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CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

gibbon's early life up to the time of his 

leaving oxford 1 

\ 

CHAPTER II. 

'AT LAUSANNE ..„.„„. 19 

CHAPTER III. 

IN THE MILITIA .->....'.... 33 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE ITALIAN JOURNEY . „ ........ 47 

CHAPTER V. 

LITERARY SCHEMES. — THE HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND. 

DISSERTATION ON THE ' SIXTH JENEID. —FATHER'S 
DEATH. SETTLEMENT IN LONDON ..... 58 



vi CONTENTS. 

CHAPTEE VI. 

PACK 
LIFE IN LONDON. — PARLIAMENT. — THE BOARD OF TRADE. 

— THE DECLINE AND FALL. — MIGRATION TO LAU- 
SANNE 69 

CHAPTEE VII. 

THE FIRST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL 95 

CHAPTEE VIII. 

THE LAST TEN TEARS OF HIS LIFE AT LAUSANNE . . 135 

CHAPTEE IX. 

THE LAST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL 144 

CHAPTEE X. 

LAST ILLNESS. — DEATH. — CONCLUSION. 169 



GIBBON 



CHAPTER I. 

gibbon's early life up to the time of his leaving 

OXFORD. 

Edward Gibbon 1 was born at Putney, near London, 
on 27th April in the year 1737. After the reformation 
of the calendar his birthday became the 8th of May. 
He was the eldest of a family of seven children ; but 
his five brothers and only sister all died in early infancy, 
and he could remember in after life his sister alone, 
whom he also regretted. 

He is at some pains in his Memoirs to show the 
length and quality of his pedigree, which he traces back 
to the times of the Second and Third Edwards. Noting 
the fact, we pass on to a nearer ancestor, his grand- 

1 Gibbon's Memoirs and Letters are of such easy access that I 
have not deemed it necessary to encumber these pages with refer- 
ences to them. Any one who wishes to control my statements will 
have no difficulty in doing so with the Miscellaneous Works, 
edited by Lord Sheffield, in his hand. Whenever I advance any- 
thing that seems to require corroboration, I have been careful to 
give my authority. 



2 GIBBON. [chap. 

father, who seems to have been a person of considerable 
energy of character and business talent. He made a 
large fortune, which he lost in the South-Sea Scheme, 
and then made another before his death. He was 
one of the Commissioners of Customs, and sat at the 
Board with the poet Prior ; Bolingbroke was heard to 
declare that no man knew better than Mr. Edward 
Gibbon the commerce and. finances of England. His 
son, the historian's father, was a person of very inferior 
stamp. He was educated at Westminster and Cam- 
bridge, travelled on the Continent, sat in Parliament, 
lived beyond his means as a country gentleman, and 
here his achievements came to an end. He seems to 
have been a kindly but a weak and impulsive man, who 
however had the merit of obtaining and deserving his 
sons affection by genial sympathy and kindly treatment. 
Gibbon's childhood was passed in chronic illness, 
debility, and disease. All attempts to give him a 
regular education were frustrated by his precarious 
health. The longest period he ever passed at school 
were two years at Westminster, but he was constantly 
moved from on© school to another. This even his deli- 
cacy can hardly explain, and it must have been fatal 
to all sustained study. Two facts he mentions of his 
school life, which paint the manners of the age. In the 
year 1746 such was the strength of party spirit that 
he, a child of nine years of age, " was reviled and 
buffeted for the sins of his Tory ancestors." Secondly, 
the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier 
way of leading the most studious of boys to a love of 
science than corporal punishment. " At the expense of 
many tears and some blood I purchased the knowledge 
of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would 



l] EARLY LIFE. 3 

have been flogged out of him if he had remained at 
school, it is difficult to say, but it is not an improbable 
supposition that this would have happened. The risk 
was removed by his complete failure of health. " A 
strange nervous affection, which alternately contracted 
his legs and produced, without any visible symptom, 
the most excruciating pain," was his chief affliction, 
followed by intervals of languor and debility. The 
saving of his life during these dangerous years Gibbon 
unhesitatingly ascribes to the more than maternal care 
of his aunt, Catherine Porten, on writing whose name 
for the first time in his Memoirs, " he felt a tear of 
gratitude trickling down his cheek." " If there be 
any," he continues, " as I trust there are some, who 
rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman 
they must hold themselves indebted. Many anxious 
and solitary hours and days did she consume m the 
patient trial of relief and amusement ; many wakeful 
nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation 
that every hour would be my last." Gibbon is rather 
anxious to get over these details, and declares he has 
no wish to expatiate on a " disgusting topic." This is 
quite in the style of the ancien regime. There was 
no blame attached to any one for being ill in those 
days, but people were expected to keep their infirmities 
to themselves. " People knew how to live and die in 
those days, and kept their infirmities out of sight. 
You might have the gout, but you must walk about all 
the same without making grimaces. It was a point 
of good breeding to hide one's sufferings." 1 Simi- 
larly Walpole was much offended by a too faithful 
publication of Madame de Sevigne's Letters. " Heaven 
1 George Sand, quoted in Taine's Ancien Regime, p. 181. 
1* 






4 GIBBON. [chap. 

forbid," he says, " that I should say that the letters 
of Madame de Sevigne were bad. I only meant that 
they were full of family details and mortal distempers, 
to which the most immortal of us are subject." But 
Gibbon was above all things a veracious historian, and 
fortunately has not refrained from giving us a truthful 
picture of his childhood. 

Of his studies, or rather his reading — his early and 
invincible love of reading, which he would not 'ex- 
change for the treasures of India — he gives us a full 
account, and we notice at once the interesting fact 
that a considerable portion of the historical field after- 
wards occupied by his great work had been already 
gone over by Gibbon before he was well in his teens. 
" My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees into 
the historic line, and since philosophy has exploded 
all innate ideas and natural propensities, I must 
ascribe the choice to the assiduous perusal of the 
Universal History as the octavo volumes successively 
appeared. This unequal work referred and intro- 
duced me to the Greek and Roman historians, to as 
many at least as were accessible to an English reader. 
All that I could find were greedily devoured, from 
Littlebury's lame Herodotus to Spelman's valuable 
Xenophon, to the pompous folios of Gordon's Tacitus, 
and a ragged Procopius of the beginning of the last 
century." Referring to an accident which threw the 
continuation of Echard's Roman History in his way, he 
says, " To me the reigns of the successors of Con- 
stantine were absolutely new, and I was immersed in 
the passage of the Goths over the Danube, when the 
summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me from 
my intellectual feast. ... I procured the second and 



i.] EARLY LIFE. 5 

third volumes of Howell's History of the World, which 
exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet 
and his Saracens soon fixed my attention, and some 
instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. 
Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led 
from one book to another till I had ranged round the 
circle of Oriental history. Before I was sixteen I had 
exhausted all that could be learned in English* of the 
Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks, and the 
same ardour urged me to guess at the French of 
D'Herbelot and to construe the barbarous Latin of 
Pocock's Abulfaragius." Here is in rough outline a 
large portion at least of the Decline and Fall already 
surveyed. The fact shows how deep was the sympathy 
that Gibbon had for his subject, and that there was a 
sort of pre established harmony between his mind and 
the historical period he afterwards illustrated. 

TJp to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, 
as he says,- was destined to remain through life an 
illiterate cripple. But as he approached his sixteenth 
year, a great change took place in his constitution, and 
his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and 
strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. 
This unexpected recovery was not seized by his father 
in a rational spirit, as affording a welcome opportunity 
of repairing the defects of a hitherto imperfect educa- 
tion. Instead of using the occasion thus presented of 
recovering some of the precious time lost, of laying a 
txmnd foundation of scholarship and learning on which 
a superstructure at the university or elsewhere could 
be ultimately built, he carried the lad off in an impulse 
of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as a 
gentleman commoner at Magdalen College just before he 



3 GIBBON. ^chap. 

Iiad completed his fifteenth year (1752, April 3). This 
was perhaps the most unwise step he could have taken 
under the circumstances. Gibbon was too young and 
ioo ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford 
to a more mature student, and his status as a gentleman 
commoner seemed intended to class him among the idle 
and dissipated who are only expected to waste their 
money and their time. A good education is generally 
considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor ; 
but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the 
wise solicitude of his parents or guardians rather than 
on himself. If Gibbon escaped the peril of being an 
ignorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was his own. 

At no period in their history had the English uni- 
versities sunk to a lower condition as places of education 
than a.t the time when Gibbon went up to Oxford. 
To speak of them as seats of learning seems like irony ; 
they were seats of nothing but coarse living and clown- 
ish manners, the centres where all the faction, party 
spirit, and bigotry of the country were gathered to a head. 
In this evil pre eminence both of the universities and 
all the colleges appear to have been upon a level, though 
Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright excep- 
tion in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. 
The strange thing is that, with all their neglect of 
learning and morality, the colleges were not the resorts 
of jovial if unseemly boon companionship ; they were 
collections of quarrelsome and spiteful litigants, who 
spent their time in angry lawsuits. The indecent con 
tentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity 
were no isolated scandal. They are best known and 
remembered on account of the eminence of the chief 
disputants, and of the melancholy waste of Bentley 's 



I.] EARLY LIFE. 7 

genius which they occasioned. Hearne writes of Oxford 
in 1726, "There are such differences now in the Univer- 
sity of Oxford (hardly one college but where all the 
members are busied in law business and quarrels not 
at all relating to the promotion of learning), that good 
letters decay every day, insomuch that this ordination 
on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I 
am informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, 
which is the more to be noted because our bishops, 
and those employed by them, are themselves illiterate 
men." 1 The state of things had not much improved 
twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but 
perhaps it had improved a little. • He does not mention 
lawsuits as a favourite pastime of the Fellows. " The 
Fellows or monks of my time," he says, "were decent, 
easy men,- who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder : 
their days were filled by a series of uniform employ- 
ments — the chapel, the hall, the coffee-house, and the 
common room — till they retired weary and well satisfied 
to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, writing, 
or thinking they had absolved their consciences. Their 
conversation stagnated in a round of college business, 
Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal. 
Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intem- 
perance of youth, and their constitutional toasts were 
not expressive of the most lively loyalty to the House 
of Hanover." Some Oxonians perhaps could still partly 
realise the truth of this original picture by their re- 
collections of faint and feeble copies of it drawn from 
their experience in youthful days. It seems to be cer- 
tain that the universities, far from setting a model of 

1 Social Life at the English Universities. By Christopher 
"Wordsworth. Page 57. 



8 GIBBON. [chap. 

good living, were really below the average standard of 
the morals and manners of the age, and the standard was 
not high. Such a satire as the Terrce Filius of Amhurst 
cannot be accepted without large deductions ; but the 
caricaturist is compelled by the conditions of his craft 
to aim at the true seeming, if he neglects the true, and 
with the benefit of this limitation the Terrce Filius 
reveals a deplorable and revolting picture of vulgarity, 
insolence, and licence. The universities are spoken of 
in terms of disparagement by men of all classes. Lord 
Chesterfield speaks of the "rust" of Cambridge as 
something of which a polished man should promptly rid 
himself. Adam Smith showed his sense of the defects 
of Oxford in a stern section of the Wealth of Nations, 
written twenty years after he had left the place, Even 
youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express 
themselves with contempt for their respective uni- 
versities. " Consider me," says the latter, writing from 
Christ Church, " very seriously, here is a strange country, 
inhabited by things that call themselves Doctors and 
Masters of Arts, a country flowing with syllogisms and 
ale ; where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown." 
Gray, answering from Peterhouse, can only do justice 
to his feelings by quoting the words of the Hebrew 
prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cambridge 
equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of 
the wild beasts and wild asses, of the satyrs that 
dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a court for 
owls. 

Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by 
his careless father at the age of fifteen. That he suc- 
c imbed to the unwholesome atmosphere cannot surprise 
us He does not conceal, perhaps he rather exaggerates. 



i.] EARLY LIFE. 9 

in his Memoirs, the depth of his fall. As Bunyan in 
a state of grace accused himself of dreadful sins which 
in all likelihood he never committed, so it is probable 
that Gibbon, in his old age, when study and learning 
were the only passions he knew, reflected with too much 
severity on che boyish freaks of his university life. 
Moreover there appears to have been nothing coarse 
or unworthy in his dissipation ; he was simply idle. 
He justly lays much of the blame on the authorities. 
To say that the discipline was lax would be to pay 
it an unmerited compliment. There was no discipline 
at all. He lived in Magdalen as he might have 
lived at the Angel or the Mitre Tavern. He not 
only left his college, but he left the university, when- 
ever he liked. In one winter he made a tour to 
Bath, another to Buckinghamshire, and he made four 
excursions to London, " without once hearing the voice 
of admonition, without once feeling the hand of con- 
trol." Of study he had just as much and as little as he 
pleased. 

" As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency 
of his disciple in school learning, he proposed that we 
should read every morning from ten to eleven the 
comedies of Terence. During the first weeks I con- 
stantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room ; but 
as they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, 
I was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal 
apology. The apology was accepted with a smile. I 
repeated the offence with less ceremony : the excuse was 
admitted with the same indulgence ; the slightest motive 
d£ laziness or indisposition, the most trifling avocation 
%t home or abroad was allowed as a worthy impediment, 
nor did my tutor appear conscious of my absence or 



10 GIBBON. [chap. 

neglect." No wonder he spoke with indignation of such 
scandalous neglect. "To the University of Oxford," 
he says, " I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as 
readily renounce me for a son, as I ani willing to dis- 
claim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at 
Magdalen College ; they proved the most idle and un- 
profitable of my whole life. The reader will pronounce 
between the school and the scholar." This is only just 
and fully merited by the abuses denounced. One appre- 
ciates the anguish of the true scholar mourning over 
lost time as a miser over lost gold. There was 
another side of the question which naturally did 
not occur to Gibbon, but which may properly occur to 
us. Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing 
the scholastic drill of the regular public school and 
university man % Something he undoubtedly lost : he 
was never a finished scholar, up to the standard even of 
his own day. If he had been, is it certain that the 
accomplishment would have been all gain 1 It may be 
doubted. At a later period Gibbon read the classics 
with the free and eager curiosity of a thoughtful mind. 
It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour, similar to 
the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance. 
This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in 
a prescribed groove. How much of that zest for anti- 
quity, of that keen relish for the classic writers which 
he afterwards acquired and retained through life, might 
have been quenched if he had first made their acquaint- 
ance as school-books 1 Above all, would he have looked 
on the ancient world with such freedom and originality 
as he afterwards gained, if he had worn through youth 
the harness of academical study? These questions do 
not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt. 



I.] EARLY LIFE. 11 

Oxford and Cambridge for nearly a century have been 
turning out crowds of thorough -paced scholars of the 
orthodox pattern. It is odd that the two greatest his- 
torians who have been scholars as well — Gibbon and 
Grote — were not university-bred men. 

As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in 
" the school or the scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left 
Oxford for the long vacation, than his taste for study 
returned, and, not content with reading, he attempted 
original composition. The subject he selected was a 
curious one for a youth in his sixteenth year. It was 
an attempt to settle the chronology of the age of Sesos- 
tris, and shows how soon the austere side of history had 
attracted his attention. " In my childish balance," he 
says, " I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and 
Petavius, of Marsham and of Newton ; and my sleep 
has been disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the 
Septuagint with the Hebrew computation." Of course 
his essay had the usual value of such juvenile produc- 
tions ; that is, none at all, except as an indication of 
early bias to serious study of history. On his return 
to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was wisely relinquished. 
He indeed soon commenced a line of study which was 
destined to have a lasting influence on the remainder of 
his course through life. 

He had an inborn taste for theology and the contro- 
versies which have arisen concerning religious dogma. 
" From my childhood," he says, " I had been fond of 
religious disputation : my poor aunt has often been 
puzzled by the mysteries which she strove to believe." 
How he carried the taste into mature life, his great 
chapters on the heresies and controversies of the 
Early Church are there to show. This inclination for 
B 



12 GIBBON. 



[chap. 



theology, coexisting with a very different temper to- 
wards religious sentiment, recalls the similar case of the 
author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, the 
illustrious Pierre Bayle, whom Gibbon resembled in 
more ways than one. At Oxford his religous education, 
like everything else connected with culture, had been 
entirely neglected. It seems hardly credible, yet we 
have his word for it, that he never subscribed or 
studied the Articles of the Church of England, and 
was never confirmed. When he first went up, he was 
judged to be too young, but the Vice Chancellor 
directed him to return as soon as he had completed 
his fifteenth year, recommending him in the meantime 
to the instruction of his college. " My college forgot 
to instruct ; I forgot to return, and was myself for- 
gotten by the first magistrate of the university. With- 
out a single lecture, either public or private, either 
Christian or Protestant, without any academical sub- 
scription, without any episcopal ordination, I was left 
by light of my catechism to grope my way to the 
chapel and communion table, where I was admitted 
without question how far or by what means I might 
be qualified to receive the sacrament. Such almost in- 
credible neglect was productive of the worst mischiefs." 
What did Gibbon mean by this last sentence % Did he, 
when he wrote it, towards the end of his life, regret 
the want of early religious instruction 1 Nothing leads 
us to think so, or to suppose that his subsequent loss of 
faith was a heavy grief, supported, but painful to bear 
His mind was by nature positive, or even pagan, and he 
had nothing of what the Germans c ill religiositat in 
him. Still there is a passage in his Memoirs where 
he oddly enough laments not having selected the fut 



I.] EAELY LIFE. 13 

slumbers of the Church as an eligible profession. Did 
he reflect that perhaps the neglect of his religious educa- 
tion at Oxford had deprived him of a bishopric or a good 
deanery, and the learned leisure which such positions 
at that time conferred on those who cared for it ? He 
could not feel that he was morally, or even spiritually, 
unfit for an office filled in his own time by such men 
as Warburton and Hurd. He would not have disgraced 
the episcopal bench ; he would have been dignified, 
courteous, and hospitable ; a patron and promoter of 
learning, we may be sure. His literary labours would 
probably have consisted of an edition of a Greek play 
or two, and certainly some treatise on the Evidences of 
Christianity. But in that case we should not have had 
the Decline and Fall. 

The " blind activity of idleness " to which he was 
exposed at Oxford, prevented any result of this kind. 
For want of anything better to do, he was led to read 
Middleton's Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers 
which are /Supjjosed to have /Subsisted in the Christian 
Church. Gibbon says that the effect of Middleton's 
" bold criticism " upon him was singular, and that 
instead of making him a sceptic, it made him more of 
a believer. He might have reflected that it is the 
commonest of occurrences for controversialists to pro- 
duce exactly the opposite result to that which they 
intend, and that as many an apology for Christianity 
has sown the first seeds of infidelity, so an attack upon 
it might well intensify faith. What follows is very 
curious. " The elegance of style <and freedom of argu- 
ment were repelled by a shield of prejudice. I still 
revered the character., or rather the names of the saints 
and fathers whom Dr. Middleton exposes ; nor could he 






] 1 GIBBON. [chap. 

destroy my implicit belief that the gift of miraculous 
powers was continued in the Church during the first 
four or five centuries of Christianity. But I was un- 
able to resist the weight of historical evidence, that 
within the same period most of the leading doctrines of 
Popery were already introduced in theory and practice. 
Nor was my conclusion absurd that miracles are the 
test of truth, and that the Church must be orthodox 
and pure which was so often approved by the visible 
interposition of the Deity. The marvellous tales which 
are boldly attested by the Basils and Chrysostoms, the 
Austins and Jeromes, compelled me to embrace the su- 
perior merits of celibacy, the institution of the monastic 
life, the use of the sign of the cross, of holy oil, and 
even of images, the invocation of saints, the worship of 
relics, the rudiments of purgatory in prayers for the 
dead, and the tremendous mystery of the sacrifice of 
the body and the "blood of Christ, which insensibly 
swelled into the prodigy of transubstantiation." In this 
remarkable passage we have a distinct foreshadow of 
the Tractarian movement, which came seventy or eighty 
years afterwards. Gibbon in 1752, at the age of fifteen, 
took up a position practically the same as Froude and 
Newman took up about the year 1830. In other words, 
he reiched the famous via media at a bound. But a 
second spring soon carried him clear of it, into the 
bosom of the Church of Borne. 

He had come to what are now called Church prin- 
ciples, by the energy of his own mind working on the 
scanty data furnished him by Middleton. By one of 
those accidents which usually happen m such cases, he 
made the acquaintance of a young gentleman who 
nd already embraced Catholicism, and who was well 



i.] EAULY LIFE. 15 

provided with controversial tracts in favour of Roman- 
ism. Among these were the two works of Bossuet, the 
Exposition of Catholic Doctrine and the History of the 
Protestant Variations. Gibbon says : "I read, I ap- 
plauded, I believed, and surely I fell by a noble hand. 
I have since examined the originals with a more discern- 
ing eye, and shall not hesitate to pronounce that Bossuet 
is indeed a master of all the weapons of controversy. 
In the Exposition, a specious apology, the orator assumes 
with consummate art the tone of candour and simpli- 
city, and the ten-horned monster is transformed at his 
magic touch into the milk-white hind, who must be 
loved as soon as she is seen. In the History, a bold 
and well-aimed attack, he displays, with a happy mix- 
ture of narrative and argument, the faults and follies, 
the changes and contradictions of our first Reformers, 
whose variations, as he dexterously contends, are the 
mark of historical error, while the perpetual unity of 
the Catholic Church is the sign and test of infallible 
truth. To my present feelings it seems incredible that I 
should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation. 
But my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental 
words, ' Hoc est corpus meum,' and dashed against each 
other the figurative half meanings of the Protestant 
sects; every objection was resolved into omnipotence, 
and, after repeating at St. Mary's the Athanasian 
Creed, I humbly acquiesced in the mystery of the 
Real Presence." 

Many reflections are suggested on the respective 
domains of reason and faith by these words, but they 
caimot be enlarged on here. No one, nowadays, one 
may hope, would think of making Gibbon's conversion 
a subject of reproach to him. The danger is rather that 



16 GIBBON. [chap. 

it should be regarded with too much honour. It unques- 
tionably shows the early and trenchant force of his 
intellect : he mastered the logical position in a moment; 
saw the necessity of a criterion of faith ; and being told 
that it was to be found in the practice of antiquity, boldly 
went there, and abided by the result. But this praise 
to his head does not extend to his heart. A more tender 
and deep moral nature would not have moved so rapidly. 
We must in fairness remember that it was not his fault 
that his religious education had been neglected at home, 
at school, and at college. But we have no reason to 
think that had it been attended to, the result would 
have been much otherwise. The root of spiritual life 
did not exist in him. It never withered, because it never 
shot up. Thus when he applied his acute mind to a 
religious problem, he contemplated it with the coolness 
and impartiality of a geometer or chess player, his 
intellect operated in vacuo so to speak, untrammelled 
by any bias of sentiment or early training. He had 
no profound associations to tear out of his heart. He 
merely altered the premisses of a syllogism. When 
Catholicism was presented to him in a logical form, it 
met with no inward bar and repugnance. The house 
was empty and ready for a new guest, or rather the 
first guest. If Gibbon anticipated the Tractarian move- 
ment intellectually, he was farther removed than the 
poles are asunder from the mystic reverent spirit which 
inspired that movement. If we read the Apologia of 
Dr. Newman, we perceive the likeness and unlikeness of 
the two cases. "As a matter of simple conscience," says 
the latter, " I felt it to be a duty to protest against 
the Church of Borne." At the time he refers to Dr. 
Newman was a Catholic to a degree Gibbon never 



i.] EARLY LIFE. 17 

dreamed of, But in the one case conscience and heart- 
ties "strong as life, stronger almost than death," 
arrested the conclusions of the intellect. Ground which 
Gibbon dashed over in a few months or weeks, the 
great Tractarian took ten years to traverse. So different 
is tne mystic from the positive mind. 

Gibbon had no sooner settled his new religion than 
he resolved with a frankness which did him all hcnour 
to profess it publicly. He wrote to his father, announc- 
ing his conversion, a letter which he afterwards de- 
scribed, when his sentiments had undergone a complete 
change, as written with all the pomp, dignity, and self- 
satisfaction of a martyr. A momentary glow of enthu- 
siasm had raised him, as he said, above all worldly con- 
siderations. He had no difficulty, in an excursion to 
London, in finding a priest, who perceived in the first in- 
terview that persuasion was needless. "After sounding 
the motives and merits of my conversion, he consented 
to admit me into the pale of the Church, and at his feet 
on the 8th of June 1753, I solemnly, though privately, 
abjured the errors of heresy." He was exactly fifteen 
years and one month old. Further details, which one 
would like to have, he does not give. The scene even 
of the solemn act is not mentioned, nor whether 
he was baptized <again ; but this may be taken for 
granted. 

The fact of any one "going over to Rome" is too 
common an occurrence nowadays to attract notice. But 
in the eighteenth century it was a rare and startling 
phenomenon. Gibbon's father, who was " neither a 
bigot nor a philosopher," was shocked and astonished 
by his " son's strange departure from the religion of his 



18 GIBBON. [chap. i. 

country." He divulged the secret of young Gibbon's 
conversion, and " the gates of Magdalen College were for 
ever shut " against the latter's return. They really 
needed no shutting at all. By the fact of his conver- 
sion to Romanism he had ceased to be a member 
of the University. 



CHAPTEK IL 

AT LAUSANNE. 

; The elder Gibbon showed a decision of character and 
■ prompt energy in dealing with his son's conversion to 
Romanism, which were by no means habitual with him. 
He swiftly determined to send him out of the country, 
far away from the influences and connections which had 
done such harm. Lausanne in Switzerland was the 
place selected for his exile, in which it was resolved he 
should spend some years in wholesome reflections on the 
error he had committed in yielding to the fascinations 
of Eoman Catholic polemics. No time was lost : Gibbon 
had been received into the Church on the 8th of June, 
1753, and on the 30th of the same month he had reached 
bis destination. He was placed under the care of a 
M. Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, who had two duties 
laid upon him, a general one, to superintend the young 
nan's studies, a particular and more urgent one, to bring 
aim back to the Protestant faith. 

^ It was a severe trial which Gibbon had now to undergo. 
Re was by nature shy and retiring ; he was ignorant of 
French ; he was very young ; and with these disadvan- 
tages he was thrown among entire strangers alone, 
^fter the excitement and novelty of foreign travel were 
2 



20 GIBBON. ' [chap. 

over, and he could realise his position, he felt his heart 
sink within him. From the luxury and freedom of 
Oxford h3 was degraded to the dependence of a school- 
boy. Pavillard managed his expenses, and his supply 
of pocket money was reduced to a small monthly allow- 
ance. "I had exchanged," he says, ■" my elegant apart- 
ment in Magdalen College for a narrow gloomy street, the 
most unfrequented in an unhandsome town, for an old , 
inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill contrived 
and ill furnished, which on the approach of winter, 
instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the 
dull and invisible heat of a stove." Under these i 
gloomy auspices he began the most profitable, and after 
a time the most pleasant, period of his whole life, one i 
on which he never ceased to look back with unminglod j 
satisfaction as the starting-point of his studies and intel- j 
lectual progress. 

The first care of his preceptor was to bring about his 
religious conversion. Gibbon showed an honourable 
tenacity to his new faith, and a whole year after he had 
been exposed to the Protestant dialectics of Pavillard 
he still, as the latter observed with much regret, con- j 
tinued to abstain from meat on Fridays. There is some- 
thing slightly incongruous in the idea of Gibbon fasting 
out of religions scruples, but the fact shows that his 
religion had obtained no slight hold of him, and that 
although he had embraced it quickly, he also accepted! 
with intrepid frankness all its consequences. His was' 
not an intellect that could endure half measures and 
half lights ; he did not belong to that class of persons 
who do not know their own minds. 

However it is not surprising that his religion, placed 
where he was, was slowly but steadily undermined. Th© 



- l *1 AT LAUSANNE. 21 

Swiss clergy, he says, were acute and learned on the topics 
of controversy, and Pavillard seems to have been a good 
specimen of his class. An adult and able man, in daily 
j contact with a youth in his own house, urging per- 
sistently but with tact one side of a thesis, could hardly 
fail in the course of time to carry his point. But though 
I Gibbon is willing to allow his tutor a handsome share 
| in the work of his conversion, he maintains that it was 
I chiefly effected by his own private reflections. And this 
1 is eminently probable. What logic had set up, logic 
could throw down. He gives us a highly characteristic 
I example of the reflections in question. " I still remem- 
1 ber my solitary transport at the discovery of a philoso- 
phical argument against the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion : that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate 
I the Real Presence is attested only by a single sense — our 
sight; while the real presence itself is disproved by 
three of our senses — the sight, the touch, and the taste." 
He was unaware of the distinction between the logical 
understanding and the higher reason, which has been 
made since his time to the great comfort of thinkers of 
a certain stamp. Having reached so far, his progress 
was easy and rapid. " The various articles of the Romish 
creed disappeared like a dream, and after a full convic- 
tion, on Christmas- day, 1754, I received the sacrament 
(in the church of Lausanne. It was here that I suspended 
my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief 
in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the 
general consent of Catholics and Protestants." He thus 
(had been a Catholic for about eighteen months. 

Gibbon's resider )e at Lausanne was a memorable 
i3poch in his life on two grounds. Firstly, it was during 
| the five years he spent there that he laid the founda- 



22 GIBBON. ;chap. 

tions of that deep and extensive learning by which he 
was afterwards distinguished. Secondly, the foreign 
education he there received, at the critical period when 
the youth passes into the man, gave a permanent bent 
to his mind, and made him a continental European 
rather than an insular Englishman — two highly import- 
ant factors in his intellectual growth. 

He says that he went up to Oxford with a " stock of 
erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a 
de°ree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might have 
been ashamed. " Both erudition and ignorance were left 
pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred 
university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for 
the first time, in possession of the means of successful 
study, good health, calm, books, and tuition, up to a 
certain point : that point did not reach very far. The 
good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever 
entertained a sincere regard, was quite unequal to the 
task of forming such a mind. There is no evidence that 
he was a ripe or even a fair scholar, and the plain fact 
is that Gibbon belongs to the honourable band of self- 
taught men. " My tutor," says Gibbon, " had the good 
sense to discern how far he could be useful, and when he 
felt that I advanced beyond his speed and measure, he 
wisely left me to my genius." Under that good guid 
once he formed an extensive plan of reviewing the Latin j 
classics, in the four divisions of (1) Historians, (2) Poets, 
(3) Orators, and (4) Philosophers, in " chronological 
series from the days of Plautus and Sallust to the decline 
of the language and empire of Pome." In one year he 
read over the following authors : Virgil, Sallust, Livy, 
Velleius Paterculns, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Sue-j 
tonius, Quintus Curtius, Justin, Floras, Plautus, Terence, 



"•] AT LAUSANNE. 23 

and Lucretius. We may take his word when he says that 
this review, however rapid, was neither hasty nor super- 
ficial. Gibbon had the root of all scholarship in him, 
the most diligent accuracy and an unlimited faculty of 
taking pains. But he was a great scholar, not a minute 
one, and belonged to the robust race of the Scaligers and 
the Bentleys, rather than to the smaller breed of the 
Elmsleys and Monks, and of course, he was at no time 
a professed philologer, occupied chiefly with the niceties 
of language. The point which deserves notice in this 
account of his studies is their wide sweep, so superior 
and bracing, as compared with that narrow restric- 
tion to the "authors of the best period," patronised 
by teachers who imperfectly comprehend their own 
business. Gibbon proceeded on the common sense 
principle, that if you want to obtain a real grasp of the 
literature, history, and genius of a people, you must 
master that literature with more or less completeness 
from end to end, and that to select arbitrarily the 
authors of a short period on the grounds that they are 
{models of style, is nothing short of foolish. It was the 
principle on which Joseph Scaliger studied Greek, and 
indeed occurs spontaneously to a vigorous mind eager for 
■eal knowledge. 1 

Nor did he confine himself to reading : he felt that no 
jme is sure of knowing a language who limits his study 
i it to the perusal of authors. He practised diligently 
Latin prose composition, and this in the simplest and 

1 Vix delibatis comjugationibus Grsecis, Homernm cum interpre- 
iatione arreptum uno et viginti diebus totum didici. "Reliquos vero ' 
joetas Grcecos omnes intra quatuor menses devoravi. Neque 
■ilium oratorem aut historicum prius attigi quam poetas omnes 
jenerem. — Scaligeri Evistoloe. Lib 1. Epis. 1. 



24 



GIBBON. [cha?. 



most effectual way. " I translated an epistle of Cicero 
into French, and after throwing it aside till the words 
and phrases were obliterated from my memory, I re- 
translated my French into such Latin as I could find, 
and then compared each sentence of my imperfect version 
with the ease, the grace, the propriety of the Roman 
crator" The only odd thing in connection with this 
excellent method is that Gibbon in his Memoirs seems 
to think it was a novel discovery of his own, and would 
recommend it to the imitation of students, whereas it is 
as old as the days of Ascham at least. There is no in- 
dication that he ever in the least degree attempted Latin 
verse, and it is improbable that he should have done so, 
reading alone in Lausanne, under the slight supervision 
of such a teacher as Pavillard. The lack of this elegant 
frivolity will be less thought of now than it would some 
years ago. But we may admit that it would have been 
interesting to have a copy of hexameters or elegiacs by 
the historian of Rome So much for Latin. In Greek 
he made far less progress. He had attained his nine- 
teenth year before he learned the alphabet, and even 
after so late a beginning he did not prosecute the study 
with much energy. 

M. Pavillard seems to have taught him little more 
than the rudiments " After my tutor had left me to 
myself I worked my way through about half the Iliad, 
and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of Xeno- 
phon and Herodotus. But my ardour, destitute of aid 
and emulation, gradually cooled, and from the barren 
.task of searching words in a lexicon I withdrew to the; 
free and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus." 
This statement of the Memoirs is more than confirmed by| 
the journal of his studies, where we find him, as late as the' 



ii.] AT LAUSANNE. 25 

year 1762, when lie was twenty-five years of age, painfully 
reading Homer, it would appear, for the first time. He 
read on an average about a book a week, and when he 
had finished the Iliad this is what he says : " I have so 
far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired 
a great facility in reading the language, and treasured 
up a very great stock of words. What I have rather 
neglected is the grammatical construction of them, and 
especially the many various inflections of the verbs." 
To repair this defect he wisely resolved to bestow some 
•time every morning on the perusal of the Greek Grammar 
of Port Royal. Thus we see that at an age when many 
men are beginning to forget their Greek, Gibbon was 
j beginning to learn it. Was this early deficiency ever 
i repaired in Greek as it was in Latin % I think not. 
He never was at home in old Hellas as he was in old 
I Rome. This may be inferred from the discursive notes 
of his great work, in which he has with admirable 
skill incorporated so much of his vast and miscellaneous 
reading. But his references to classic Greek authors are 
relatively few and timid compared with his grasp and 
mastery of the Latin. His judgments on Greek authors 
are also, to say the least, singular. When he had 
achieved the Decline and Fall, and was writing his 
Memoirs in the last years of his life, the Greek writer 
whom he selects for especial commendation is Xenophon. 
I Cicero in Latin and Xenophon in Greek are indeed 
the two ancients whom I would first propose to a liberal 
scholar, not only for the merit of their style and senti- 
ments, but for the admirable lessons which may be 
applied almost to every situation of public and private 
! -ife." Of the merit of Xenophon's sentiments, most 
loeople would now admit that the less said the better. 



26 GIBBON. [chap. 

The warmth of Gibbon's language with regard toXenophon 
contrasts with the coldness he shows with regard to 
Plato. " I involved myself," he says, " in the philosophic 
maze of the writings of Plato, of which perhaps the 
dramatic is more interesting than the argumentative 
part." That Gibbon knew amply sufficient Greek for 
his purposes as an historian no one doubts, but his 
honourable candour enables us to see that he was never 
a Greek scholar in the proper sense of the word. 

It would be greatly to misknow Gibbon to suppose 
that his studies at Lausanne were restricted to the 
learned languages. He obtained something more than 
an elementary knowledge of mathematics, mastered De 
Crousaz' Logic and Locke's Essay, and filled up his spare 
time with that wide and discursive reading to which his 
boundless curiosity was always pushing him. He was 
thoroughly happy and contented, and never ceased 
throughout his life to congratulate himself on the 
fortunate exile which had placed him at Lausanne. In 
one respect he did not use his opportunities while in 
Switzerland. He never climbed a mountain all the time 
he was there, though he lived to see in his later life 
the first commencement of the Alpine fever. On the 
other hand, as became a historian and man of sense, 
the social and political aspects of the country engaged 
his attention, as well they might. He enjoyed access to 
the best society of the place, and the impression he made 
seems to have been as favourable as the one he received. 

The influence of a foreign training is very marked in 
Gibbon, affecting as it does his general cast of thought, 
and even his style. It would be difficult to name any 
writer in our language, especially among the few who 
deserve to be compared with him, who is so un-English, 



ii.] AT LAUSANNE. 27 

not in a bad sense of the word, as implying objection- 
able qualities, but as wanting the clear insuiar stamp 
and native flavour. If an intelligent Chinese or Persian 
were to read his book in a French translation, he would 
not readily guess that it was written by an Englishman. 
It really bears the imprint of no nationality, and is 
emphatically European. We may postpone the question 
whether this is a merit or a defect, but it is a character- 
istic. The result has certainly been that he is one of 
the best-known of English prose writers on the Conti- 
nent, and one whom foreigners most readily comprehend. 
This peculiarity, of which he himself was fully aware, 
we may agree with him in ascribing to his residence 
at Lausanne. At the " flexible age of sixteen he soon 
learned to endure, and gradually to adopt," foreign 
manners. French became the language in which he 
spontaneously thought; "his views were enlarged, and 
his prejudices were corrected. - ' In one particular he 
cannot be complimented on the effect of his continental 
education, when he congratulates himself "that his taste 
for the French theatre had abated his' idolatry for the 
gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from 
our infancy as the first duty of Englishmen." Still it 
is well to be rid of idolatry and bigotry even with 
regard to Shakespeare. We must remember that the 
insular prejudices from which Gibbon rejoiced to be free 
were very different in their intensity and narrowness 
from anything of the kind which exists now. The 
mixed hatred and contempt for foreigners which pre- 
vailed in his day, were enough to excite disgust in any 
liberal mind. 

The lucid order and admirable literary form of 
Gibbon's great work are qualities which can escape no 
C 2* 



28 GIBBON. [chap. 

observant reader. But they are qualities which are not 
common in English books. The French have a saying, 
^Les Anglais ne savent pas faire un livre." This is 
unjust, taken absolutely, but as a general rule it is not 
without foundation. It is not a question of depth or 
originality of thought, nor of the various merits be- 
longing to style properly so-called. In these respects 
English authors need not fear competition. But in the 
art of clear and logical arrangement, of building up 
a book in such order and method that each part con- 
tributes to the general effect of the whole, we must 
own that we have many lessons to learn of our neigh- 
bours. Now in this quality Gibbon is a Frenchman. 
Not Voltaire himself is more perspicuous than Gibbon. 
Everything is in its place, and disposed in such appa- 
rently natural sequence that the uninitiated are apt to 
think the matter could not have been managed other- 
wise. It is a case, if there ever was one, of consummate 
art concealing every trace, not only of art, but even of 
effort. Of course the grasp and penetrating insight 
which are implied here, were part of Gibbon's great 
endowment, which only Nature could give. But it was 
fortunate that his genius was educated in the best 
school for bringing out its innate quality. 

It would be difficult to explain why, except on that 
principle of decimation by which Macaulay accounted 
for the outcry against Lord Byron, Gibbon's solitary and 
innocent love passage has been made the theme of a good 
deal of malicious comment. The parties most interested, 
and who, we may presume, knew the circumstances 
better than any one else, seem to have been quite satis- 
fied with each other's conduct. Gibbon and Mdlle. 
Curchod, afterwards Madame Necker, remained on 



ii.] AT LAUSANNE. 29 

terms of the most intimate friendship till the end of the 
former's life. This might be supposed sufficient. But 
it has not been so considered by evil tongues. The 
'merits of the case, however, may be more conveniently 
discussed in a later chapter. At this point it will be 
enough to give the facts. 

Mdlle. Susanne Curchod was born about the year 
1740 ; her father was the Calvinist minister of Crassier, 
her mother a French Huguenot who had preferred her 
religion to her country. She had received a liberal and 
even learned education from her father, and was as 
attractive in person as she was accomplished in mind. 
" She was beautiful with that pure virginal beauty which 
depends on early youth " (Sainte-Beuve). In 1757 she 
was the talk of Lausanne, and could not appear in an 
assembly or at the play without being surrounded by 
admirers ; she was called La Belle Curchod. Gibbon's 
curiosity was piqued to see such a prodigy, and he was 
smitten with love at first sight. " I found her " he says 
"learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in 
sentiment, and elegant in manners." He was twenty and 
she seventeen years of age ; no impediment was placed 
in the way of their meeting ; and he was a frequent 
guest in her father's house. In fact Gibbon paid his 
court with an assiduity which makes an exception in his 
usually unromantic nature. " She listened," he says, 
| to the voice of truth and passion, and I might pre- 
sume to hope that I had made some impression on a 
virtuous heart." We must remember that this and 
other rather glowing passages in his Memoirs were 
written in his old age, when he had returned to Lau- 
sanne, and when, after a long separation and many 
vicissitudes, he and Madame Necker were again thrown 



30 GIBBON. [chap. 

together in an intimacy of friendship which revived old 
memories. Letters of hers to him which will be quoted 
in a later chapter show this in a striking light. He 
indulged, he says, his dream of felicity, but on his 
return to England he soon discovered that his father 
would not hear of this " strange alliance," and then 
follows the sentence which has lost him in the eyes of 
some persons. " After a painful struggle I yielded to my 
fate : I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." What 
else he was to do under the circumstances does not 
appear. He was wholly dependent on his father, and 
on the Continent at least parental authority is not 
regarded as a trifling impediment in such cases. Gibbon 
could only have married Mdlle. Curchod as an exile and 
a pauper, if he had openly withstood his father's wishes. 
" All for love " is a very pretty maxim, but it is apt to 
entail trouble when practically applied. Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, who had the most beautiful sentiments on 
paper, but who in real life was not always a model of 
self-denial, found, as we shall' see, grave fault with 
Gibbon's conduct. Gibbon, as a plain man of rather 
prosaic good sense, "behaved neither heroically nor 
meanly. Time, absence, and the scenes of a new life, 
which he found in England, had their usual effect ; his 
passion vanished. "My cure," he says, " was accelerated 
by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness 
of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship 
and esteem." The probability, indeed, that he and 
Mdlle. Curchod would ever see each other again, must | 
have seemed remote in the extreme. Europe and England 
were involved in the Seven Years War ; he was fixed at 
home, and an officer in the militia; Switzerland was 
far off ; when and where were they likely to meet 1 



P AT LAUSANNE. 31 

They did, contrary to all expectation, meet again, and 
renewed terms not so much of friendship as of affection. 
Mdlle. Curchod, as the wife of Keeker, became somewhat 
jof a celebrity, and it is chiefly owing to these last-named 
circumstances that the world has ever heard of Gibbon's 
early love. 

While he was at Lausanne Gibbon made the acquaint- 
ance of Voltaire, but it led to no intimacy or fruitful 
reminiscence. "He received me with civility as an 
English youth, but I cannot boast of any peculiar notice 
or distinction." Still he had -the satisfaction of hear- 
ing—an uncommon circumstance— a great poet declaim 
bis own productions on the stage." One is often 
tempted, in reading Gibbon's Memoirs, to regret that 
he adopted the austere plan vh/ch led him "to condemn 
;he practice of transforming a private memorial into a 
vehicle of satire or praise." As he truly says, "It was 
issuredly in his power to amuse the reader with a gal- 
jeryof portraits and a collection of anecdotes." This 
j-eserve is particularly disappointing when a striking 
Ud original figure like Voltaire passes across the field, 
jvithout an attempt to add one stroke to the portraiture 
>f such a physiognomy. 

Gibbon had now (1758) been nearly five years at 
uausanne, when his father suddenly intimated that he 
ras to return home immediately. The Seven Years War 
ras at its height, and the French had denied a passage 
trough France to English travellers. Gibbon, or more 
>roperly his Swiss friends, thought that the alternative 
oad through Germany might be dangerous, though it 
Slight have been assumed that the Great Frederick, so far 
W he was concerned, would make things as pleasant as 
aossible to British subjects, whose country had just 



32 GIBBON. [chap. ii. 

consented to supply him with a much-needed subsidy. 
The French route- was preferred, perhaps as much 
from a motive of frolic as anything else. Two Swiss 
officers of his acquaintance undertook to convey Gibbon 
$rom France as one of their companions, under an 
assumed name, and in borrowed regimentals. His com- 
plete mastery of French removed any chance of detec- 
tion on the score of language, and with a " mixture of 
joy and regret'' on the 11th April, 1758, Gibbon left 
Lausanne. He had a pleasant journey, but no adven- 
tures, and returned to his native land after an absence 
of four years, ten months, and fifteen days. 



CHAPTER III. 

IN THE MILITIA. 

The only person whom, on his return, Gibbon had the 
least wish to see was his aunt, Catherine Porten. To her 
house he at once hastened, and " the evening was spent 
in the effusions of joy and tenderness." He looked for- 
ward to his first meeting with his father with no slight 
anxiety, and that for two reasons. First, his father had 
parted from him with anger and menace, and he had no 
idea how he would be received now. Secondly, his 
mother's place was occupied by a second wife, and an 
involuntary but strong prejudice possessed him against 
his step-mother. He was most agreeably disappointed 
in both respects. His father " received him as a man, as 
a friend, all constraint was banished at our first inter- 
view, and we ever after continued on the same terms of 
easy and equal politeness." So far the prospect was 
pleasant. But the step-mother remained a possible obsta- 
cle to all comfort at home. He seems to have regarded 
his father's second marriage as an act of displeasure 
with himself, and he was disposed to hate the rival of 
his mother. Gibbon soon found that the injustice 
was in his own fancy, and the imaginary monster was 
an amiable and deserving woman. "I could not be 



34 • GIBBON . [chap. 

mistaken in the first view of her understanding ; her 
knowledge and the elegant spirit of her conversation, 
her polite welcome, and her assiduous care to study and 
gratify my wishes announced at least that the surface 
would be smooth ; and my suspicions of art and false- 
hood were gradually dispelled by the full discovery of 
her warm and exquisite sensibility." He became indeed 
deeply attached to his step-mother. " After some re- 
serve on my side, our minds associated in confidence 
and friendship, and as Mrs. Gibbon had neither children 
nor the hopes of children, we more easily adopted the 
tender names and genuine characters of mother and 
son." A most creditable testimony surely to the worth 
and amiability of both of them. The friendship thus 
begun continued without break or coolness to the end 
of Gibbon's life. Thirty-five years after his first inter- 
view with his step mother, and only a few months 
before his own death, when he was old and ailing, and 
the least exertion, by reason of his excessive corpulence, 
involved pain and trouble, he made a long journey to 
Bath for the sole purpose of paying Mrs. Gibbon a 
visit. He was very far from being the selfish Epicurean 
that has been sometimes represented. 

He had brought with him from Lausanne the first 
pages of a work which, after much bashfulness and 
delay, he at length published in the French language, 
under the title of Essai sur V Etude de la Litterature, in 
the year 1761, that is two years after its completion. 
In one respect this juvenile work of Gibbon has little 
merit. The style is at once poor and stilted, and the 
general quality of remark eminently commonplace, 
where it does not fall into paradox. On the other hand, 
it has an interesting and even original side. The main 



i 



iti.] IN THE MILITIA. 35 

idea of the little book, so far as it has one, was excel- 
lent, and really above the general thought of the age, 
namely, the vindication of classical literature and 
history generally from the narrow and singular pre- 
judice which prevailed against them, especially in 
France. When Gibbon ascribes the design of his first 
work to a " refinement of vanity, the desire of justi- 
fying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit," 
he does himself less than just'ce. This first utterance 
of his historic genius was prompted by an unconscious 
but deep reaction against that contempt for the past, 
which was the greatest blot in the speculative movement 
of the eighteenth century. He resists the temper of his 
time rather from instinct than reason, and pleads the 
cause of learning with the hesitation of a man who has 
not fully seen round his subject, or even mastered his 
own thoughts upon it. Still there is his protest against 
the proposal of D'Alembert, who recommended that 
after a selection of facts had been made at the end of 
every century the remainder should be delivered to the 
flames. "Let us preserve them all," he says, " most 
carefully. A Montesquieu will detect in the most 
insignificant, relations which the vulgar overlook." 
He resented the haughty pretensions of the mathe- 
matical sciences to universal dominion, with sufficient 
vigour to have satisfied Auguste Comte. " Physics and 
mathematics are at present on the throne. They see 
! their sister sciences prostrate before them, chained to 
their chariot, or at most occupied in adorning their 
triumph. Perhaps their downfall is not far off." To 
speak of a positive downfall of exact sciences was a 
mistake. But we may fairly suppose that Gibbon did 
not contemplate anything beyond a relative change of 



36 GIBBOK. [ CHAP< 

position in the hierarchy of the sciences, by which 
history and politics would recover or attain to a dignity 
which was denied them in his day. In one passage 
Gibbon shows that he had dimly foreseen the possibility 
of the modem inquiries into the conditions of savage 
life and prehistoric man. "An Iroquois book, even 
were it full of absurdities, would be an invaluable 
treasure. It would offer a unique example of the nature 
of the human mind placed in circumstances which we 
have never known, and influenced by manners and re- 
ligious opinions, the complete opposite of ours." In 
this sentence Gibbon seems to call in anticipation for 
the researches which have since been prosecuted with 
so much success by eminent writers among ourselves, 
not to mention similar inquirers on the Continent. 

But in the meantime Gibbon had entered on a career 
which removed him for long months from books and 
study. Without sufficiently reflecting on what such a 
step involved, he had joined the militia, which was em- 
bodied in the year 1760 ; and for the next two and a 
half years led as he says, a wandering life of military 
servitude. At first, indeed, he was so pleased with 
his new mode of life that he had serious thoughts of 
becoming a professional soldier. But this enthusiasm 
speedily wore off, and our " mimic Bellona soon revealed 
to his eyes her naked deformity." It was indeed no 
mere playing at soldiering that he had undertaken 
He was the practical working commander of " an inde- 
pendent corps of 476 officers and men." "In the 
absence, or even in the presence of the two field 
officers " (one of whom was his father, the major) " I 
was intrusted with the effective labour of dictating the 
orders and exercising the battalion." And his duty did 



III.] IN THE MILITIA. 37 

not consist in occasional drilling and reviews, but in 
serious marches, sometimes of thirty miles in a day, and 
camping under canvas. One encampment, on Win- 
chester Downs, lasted four months. Gibbon does not 
hesitate to say that the superiority of his grenadiers 
to the detachments of the regular army, with which they 
were often mingled, was so striking that the most pre- 
judiced regular could not have hesitated a moment to 
admit it. But the drilling, and manoeuvring, and all 
that pertained to the serious side of militia business 
interested Gibbon, and though it took up time it gave 
him knowledge of a special kind, of which he quite 
appreciated the value. He was much struck, for 
instance, by the difference between the nominal and 
effective force of every regiment he had seen, even 
when supposed to be complete, and gravely doubts 
whether a nominal army of 100,000 men often brings 
fifty thousand into the field. What he found unen- 
durable was the constant shifting of quarters, the utter 
want of privacy and leisure it often entailed, and the 
distasteful society in which he was forced to live. For 
eight months at a stretch he never took a book in his 
hand. " From the day we marched from Blandford, I 
had hardly a moment I could call my own, being almost 
continually in motion, or if I was fixed for a day, it was 
in the guardroom, a barrack, or an inn." Even worse 
were the drinking and late hours ; sometimes in " rustic " 
company, sometimes in company in which joviality and 
wit were more abundant than decorum and common sense, 
which will surprise no one who hears that the famous 
John Wilkes, who was colonel of the Buckingham 
militia, was not unfrequently one of his boon com- 
panions. A few extracts from his journal will be enough. 



S8 GIBBON. [chap. 

"To-day (August 28, 1762), Sir Thomas Worsley," the 
colonel of the battalion, '■ came to us to dinner. 
Pleased to see him, we kept bumperising till after 
roll-calling, Sir Thomas assuring us every fresh bottle 
how infinitely sober he was growing." September 23rd. 
" Colonel Wilkes, of the Buckingham militia, dined with 
us, and renewed the acquaintance Sir Thomas and 
myself had begun with him at Reading. I scarcely 
ever met with a better companion ; he has inexhaust- 
ible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal 
of knowledge . . . This proved a very debauched day ; 
we drank a great deal both after dinner and supper ; 
and when at last Wilkes had retired, Sir Thomas and 
some others (of whom I was not one) broke into his 
room and made him drink a bottle of claret in bed." 
December 17. "We found old Captain Meard at 
Arlesford with the second division of the Fourteenth. 
He and all his officers supped with us, which made the 
evening rather a drunken one." Gibbon might well 
say that the militia was unfit for and unworthy of him. 
Yet it is quite astonishing to see, as recorded in his 
journal, how keen an interest he still managed to retain 
in literature in the midst of all this dissipation, and 
how fertile he was of schemes and projects of future 
historical works to be prosecuted under more favourable 
auspices. Subject after subject occurred to him as 
eligible and attractive ; he caresses the idea for a time, 
then lays it aside for good reasons. First, he pitched 
upon the expedition of Charles YITT. of France into 
Italy. He read and meditated upon it, and wrote a 
dissertation of ten folio pages, besides large notes, in 
which he examined the right of Charles VIII. to the 
crown of Naples, and the rival claims of the houses of 



in.] IN THE MILITIA. 39 

Anjou and Aragon. In a few weeks he gives up this idea, 
firstly, for the rather odd reason that the subject was too 
remote from us; and, secondly, for the very good reason 
that the expedition was rather the introduction to great 
events than great and important in itself. He then suc- 
cessively chose and rejected the Crusade of Richard the 
First; the Barons' War against John and Henry III. ; the 
history of Edward the Black Prince ; the lives and com- 
parisons of Henry Y. and the Emperor Titus ; the life of 
Sir Philip Sidney, and that of the Marquis of Montrose. 
At length he fixed on Sir Walter Raleigh as his hero. 
On this he worked with all the assiduity that his militia 
life allowed, read a great quantity of original docu- 
ments relating to it, and, after some months of labour, 
declared that " his subject opened upon him, and in 
general improved upon a nearer prospect." But half a 
year later he " is afraid he will have to drop his hero." 
And he covers half a page with leasons to persuade 
himself that he was right in doing so. Besides the 
obvious one that he would be able to add little that 
was not already accessible in Oldys' Life of Raleigh, 
that the topic was exhausted, and so forth, he goes on 
to make these remarks, which have more signification to 
us now than perhaps they had to him when he wrote 
them. " Could I even surmount these obstacles, I 
should shrink with terror from the modern history of 
England, where every character is a problem and every 
reader a friend or an enemy : when a writer is supposed 
to hoist a flag of party, and is devoted to damnation by 
the adverse faction. Such would be my reception at 
home ; and abroad the historian of Raleigh must en- 
counter an indifference far more bitter than censure or 
reproach. The events of his life are interesting; but 



40 GIBBON. [chap. 

his character is ambiguous ; his actions are obscure ; his 
writings are English, arid his fame is confined to the 
narrow limits of our language and our island. / must 
embrace a safer and more extensive theme." Here we 
see the first gropings after a theme of cosmopolitan 
interest. He has arrived at two negative conclusions : 
that it must not be- English, and must not be narrow. 
What it is to be, does not yet appear, for he has still a 
series of subjects to go through, to be taken up and 
discarded. The history of the liberty of the Swiss, 
which at a later period he partially achieved, was one 
scheme ; the history of Florence under the Medici was 
another. He speaks with enthusiasm of both projects, 
adding that he will most probably fix upon the latter ; 
but he never did anything of the kind. 

These were the topics which occupied Gibbon's mind 
during his service in the militia, escaping when he could 
from the uproar and vulgarity of the camp and the 
guardroom to the sanctuary of the historic muse, to 
worship in secret. But these private devotions could 
not remove his disgust at "the inn, the wine, and the 
company " he was forced to endure, and latterly the 
militia became downright insupportable to him. But 
honourable motives kept him to his post. " From a 
service without danger I might have retired without 
disgrace ; but as often as I hinted a wish of re- 
signing, my fetters were riveted by the friendly in- 
treaties of the colonel, the parental authority of the 
major, and my own regard for the welfare of the 
battalion." At last the long-wished-for day arrived, 
when the militia was disbanded. "Our two com- 
panies," he writes in his journal, "were disembodied 
(December 23rd, 1782), mine at Alton, my father's at 



in,] IN THE MILITIA. 41 

Buriton. They fired three volleys, lodged the major's 
colours, delivered up their arms, received their money, 
partook of a dinner at the major's expense, and then 
separated, with great cheerfulness and regularity. Thus 
ended the militia." The compression that his spirit had 
endured was shown by the rapid energy with which . 
he sought a change of scene and oblivion of his woes. 
Within little more than a month after the scene just 
described, Gibbon was in Paris beginning the grand 
tour. 

With that keen sense of the value of time which 
marked him, Gibbon with great impartiality cast up 
and estimated the profit and loss of his " bloodless 
campaigns." Both have been alluded to already. He 
summed up with great fairness in the entry that he made 
in his journal on the evening of the day on which he re- 
covered his liberty. " I am glad that the militia has 
been, and glad that it is no more." This judgment he 
confirmed thirty years afterwards, when he composed 
his Memoirs. " My principal obligation to the militia 
was the making me an Englishman and a soldier. After 
my foreign education, with my reserved temper, I 
should long have continued a stranger in my native 
country, had I not been shaken in this various scene 
of new faces and new friends ; had not experience 
forced me to feel the characters of our leading men, 
the state of parties, the forms of office, the operations 
of our civil and military system. In this peaceful 
service I imbibed the rudiments of the language and 
science of tactics, which opened a new field of study 
and observation. I diligently read and meditated the 
Memoires Militaires of Quintus Icilius, the only writer 
who has united the merits of a professor and a veteran. 



42 GIBBON. [chap. 

The discipline and evolution of a modern battalion gave 
me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and 
the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader 
may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the 
Roman Empire." No one can doubt it who compares 
Gibbon's numerous narratives of military operations 
with the ordinary performances of civil historians in 
those matters. The campaigns of Julian, Belisarius, 
and Heraclius, not to mention many others, have not 
only an uncommon lucidity, but also exhibit a clear 
appreciation of the obstacles and arduousness of war- 
like operations, which is rare or unknown to non- 
mi] itary writers. Macaulay has pointed out that 
Swift's party pamphlets are superior in an especial 
way to the ordinary productions of that class, in 
consequence of Swift's unavowed but very serious 
participation in the cabinet councils of Oxford and 
Bolingbroke. In the same manner Gibbon had an 
advantage through his military training, which gives 
him do small superiority to even the best historical 
writers who ha,ve been without it. 

The course of foreign travel which Gibbon was now 
about to commence had been contemplated before, but 
the war and the militia had postponed it for nearly 
three years. It appears that as early as the year 1760 
the elder Gibbon had conceived the project of procuring 
a seat in Parliament for his son, and was willing to 
incur the anticipated expense of £1500 for that object. 
Young Gibbon, who seems to have very accurately gauged 
his own abilities at that early age, was convinced that 
the money could be much better employed in another 
way. He wrote in consequence, under his father's roof, 
a letter to the latter which does such credit to his 



in.] IN THE MILITIA. 43 

head and to his heart, that, although it is somewhat 
long, it cannot with propriety be omitted here. 



EDWARD GIBBON TO HIS FATHER. 

"Dear Sir, 

"An address in writing from a person who has the 
pleasure of being with you every day may appear singular. 
However I have preferred this method, as upon paper I can 
speak without a blush and be heard without interruption. 
If my letter displeases you, impute it, dear sir, to yourself. 
You have treated me, not like a son, but like a friend. Can 
you be surprised that I should communicate to a friend all 
my thoughts and all my desires ? Unless the friend approve 
them, let the father never know them ; or at least let him 
know at the same time that however reasonable, however 
eligible, my scheme may appear to me, I would rather forget 
it for ever than cause him the slightest uneasiness. 

" When I first returned to England, attentive to my future 
interests, you were so good as to give me hopes of a seat in 
Parliament. This seat, it was supposed, would be an expense 
of fifteen hundred pounds. This design nattered my vanity, 
as it might enable me to shine in so august an assembly. It 
flattered a nobler passion : I promised myself that, by the 
means of this seat, I might one day be the instrument of some 
good to my country. But I soon perceived how little mere 
virtuous inclination, unassisted by talents, could contribute 
towards that great end, and a very short examination discovered 
to me that those talents had not fallen to my lot. Do not, 
dear sir, impute this declaration to a false modesty — the meanest 
species of pride. Whatever else I may be ignorant of, I think I 
know myself, and shall always endeavour to mention my good 
qualities without vanity and my defects without repugnance. 
I shall say nothing of the most intimate acquaintance with his 
country and language, so absolutely necessary to every senator ; 
since they may be acquired, to allege my deficiency in them 
would seem only the plea of laziness. But I shall say with 
D 3 



44 GIBBON. [chap. 

great truth that I never possessed that gift of speech, the first 
requisite of an orator, which use and labour may improve, but 
which nature can alone bestow ; that my temper, quiet, retired, 
somewhat reserved^ could neither acquire popularity, bear up 
against opposition, nor mix with ease in the crowds of public 
life ; that even my genius (if you allow me any) is better 
qualified for the deliberate compositions of the closet than for 
the extempore discourses of Parliament. An unexpected * 
objection would disconcert me, and as I am incapable of ex- 
plaining to others what I do not understand myself, I should 
be meditating when I ought to be answering. I even want 
necessary prejudices of party and of nation. In popular 
assemblies it is often necessary to inspire them, and never orator & 
inspired well a passion which he did not feel himself. Suppose 
me even mistaken in my own character, to set out with the i 
repugnance such an opinion must produce offers but an in- 
different prospect. But I hear you say it is not necessary that 
every man should enter into Parliament with such exalted 
hopes. It is to acquire a title the most glorious of any in a 
free country, and to employ the weight and consideration it 
gives in the service of one's friends. Such motives, though not 
glorious, yet are not dishonourable, and if we had a borough in 
our command, if you* could bring me in without any great 
expense, or if our fortune enabled us to despise that expense, 
then indeed I should think them of the greatest strength. But 
with our private fortune, is it worth while to purchase at so high 
a rate a title honourable in itself, but which I must share with j 
every fellow that can lay out 1500 pounds ? Besides, dear 
sir, a merchandise is of little value to the owner when he is 
resolved not to sell it. 

" I should affront your penetration did I not suppose you now > 
see the drift of this letter. It is to appropriate to another use 
the sum with which you destined to bring me into Parliament ; 
to employ it, not in making me great, but in rendering me 
happy. I have often heard you say yourself that the allowance 
you had been so indulgent as to grant me, though very liberal 
in regard to your estate, was yet but small when compared with 
the almost necessary extravagances of the age. I have indeed 



in.] IN THE MILITIA. 45 

found it so, notwithstanding a good deal of economy, and an 
exemption from many of the common expenses of youth. This, 
dear sir, would be a way of supplying these deficiencies without 
any additional expense to you. But I forbear — if you think 
my proposals reasonable, you want no intreaties to engage you 
to comply with them, if otherwise all will be without effect. 

" All that I am afraid of, dear sir, is that I should seem not 
so much asking a favour, as this really is, as exacting a debt. 
After all I can say, you will remain the best judge of my good 
and your own circumstances. Perhaps, like most landed 
gentlemen, an addition to my annuity would suit you better 
than a sum of money given at once ; perhaps the sum itself may 
be too considerable. Whatever you may think proper to bestow 
on me, or in whatever manner, will be received with equal 
gratitude. 

" I intended to stop here, but as I abhor the least appearance 
of art, I think it better to lay open my whole scheme at once. 
The unhappy war which now desolates Europe will oblige me to 
defer seeing France till a peace. But that reason can have no 
influence on Italy, a country which every scholar must long to 
see. Should you grant my request, and not disapprove of my 
manner of employing your bounty, I would leave England this 
autumn and pass the winter at Lausanne with M. de Voltaire 
and my old friends. In the spring I would cross the Alps, and 
after some stay in Italy, as the war must then be terminated, 
return home through France, to live happily with you and my 
dear mother. I am now two-and-twenty ; a tour must take up 
a considerable time ; and although I believe you have no thoughts 
of settling me soon (and I am sure I have not), yet so many 
things may intervene that the man who does not travel early 
runs a great risk of not travelling at all. But this part of my 
scheme, as well as the whole of it, I submit entirely to you. 

" Permit me, dear sir, to add that I do not know whether the 
complete compliance with my wishes could increase my love 
and gratitude, but that I am very sure no refusal could 
diminish those sentiments with which I shall always remain, 
dear sir, your most dutiful and obedient son and servant. 

"E. GIBBON, Jvn," 



46 GIBBON. [chap. in. 

Instead of going to Italy in the autumn of 1760, as 
he fondly hoped when he wrote this letter, Gibbon was 
marching about the south of England at the head of 
his grenadiers. But the scheme sketched in the above 
letter was only postponed, and ultimately realised in 
every particular. The question of a seat in Parliament 
never came up again during his father's life, and no 
doubt the money it would have cost was, according to 
his wise suggestion, devoted to defray the expenses of 
his foreign tour, which he is now about to begin. 



CH^PTFR IV, 

THE ITALIAN JOURNEY. 

Gibbon reached Paris on the 28th January, 1763 ; 
thirty-six days, as he tells us, after the disbanding of 
the militia. He remained a little over three months in 
the French capital, which on the whole pleased him 
so well that he thinks that if he had been independent 
and rich, he might have been tempted to make it his 
permanent residence. 

On the other hand he seems to have been little if at 
all aware of the extraordinary character of the society 
of which he became a spectator and for a time a member. 
He does not seem to have been conscious that he. was 
witnessing one of the most singular social phases which 
have yet been presented in the history of man. And 
no blame attaches to him for this. No one of his con- 
temporaries saw deeper in this direction than he did. 
It is a remarkable instance of the way in which the 
widest and deepest social movements are veiled to the 
eyes of those who see them, precisely because of their 
width and depth. Foreigners, especially Englishmen, 
visited Paris in the latter half of the eighteenth century 
and reported variously of their experience and impres- 
sions. Some, like Hume and Sterne, are delighted; 



48 GIBBON. [chap. 

some, like Gibbon, are quietly, but thoroughly pleased ; 
some, like Walpole — though he perhaps is a class bv 
himself — are half pleased and half disgusted. They 
all feel that there is something peculiar in what they 
witness, but never seem to suspect that nothing like it 
was ever seen before in the world. One is tempted to 
wish that they could have seen with our eyes, or, much 
more, that we could have had the privilege of enjoying 
their experience, of spending a few months in that 
singular epoch when " society," properly so called, the 
assembling of men and women in drawing-rooms for 
the purpose of conversation, was the most serious as 
well as the most delightful business of life. Talk and 
discussion in the senate, • the market-place, and the 
schools are cheap ; even barbarians are not wholly 
without them. But their refinement and concentration 
in the salon — of which the president is a woman of tact 
and culture — this is a phenomenon which never appeared 
but in Paris in the eighteenth century. And yet scholars, 
men of the world, men of business passed through this 
wonderland with eyes blindfolded. They are free to 
enter, they go, they come, without a sign that they hava 
realised the marvellous scene that they were permitted 
to traverse. One does not wonder that they did not 
perceive that in those graceful drawing-rooms, filled 
with stately company of elaborate manners, ideas and 
sentiments were discussed and evolved which would 
soon be more explosive than gunpowder. One does 
not wonder that they did not see ahead of them — men 
never do. One does rather wonder that they did not 
see what was before their eyes. But wonder is useless 
and a mistake. People who have never seen a volcano 



iv.] THE ITALIAN JOURNEY. 49 

cannot be expected to fear the burning lava, or even to 
see that a volcano differs from any other mountain. 

Gibbon had brought good introductions from London, 
but he admits that they were useless, or rather super- 
fluous. His nationality and his Essai were his best 
recommendations. It was the day of Anglomania, and, 
as he says, " every Englishman was supposed to be a 
patriot and a philosopher." "I had rather be," said 
Mdlle. de Lespinasse to Lord Shelburne, " the least 
member of the House of Commons than even the King 
of Prussia." Similar things must have been said to 
Gibbon, but he has not recorded them ; and generally 
it may be said that he is disappointingly dull and in- 
different to Paris, though he liked it well enough when 
there. He never caught the Paris fever as Hume did, and 
Sterne, or even as Walpole did, for all the hard things he 
says of the underbred and overbearing manners of the 
philosophers. Gibbon had ready access to the well known 
houses of Madame Geoffrin, Madame Helvetius and 
the Baron d Hoi bach ; and his perfect mastery of the 
language must have removed every obstacle in the way 
of complete social intercourse. But no word in his 
Memoirs or Letters shows that he really saw with the 
eyes of the mind the* singularities of that strange 
epoch. And yet he was there at an exciting and im- 
portant moment. The Order of the Jt suits was tottering 
to its fall ; the latter volumes of the Encyclopedia were 
being printed, and it was no secret ; the coruscating 
wit and audacity of the salons were at their height. 
He is not unjust or prejudiced, but somewhat cold. 
He dines with Baron d'Holbach, and says his dinners 
were excellent, but nothing of the guests. He goes to 
Madame Geoffrin, and pronounces her house an excellent 



50 GIBBON. [chap. 

one. Such faint and commonplace praise reflects on the 
eulogist. The only man of letters of whom he speaks 
with warmth is Helve tius. He does not appear in 
this first visit to have known Madame du Deffand, who 
was still keeping her salon with the help of the pale 
deep-eyed L'Espinasse, though the final rupture was 
imminent. Louis Racine died, and so did Marivaux, 
while he was in Paris. The old Opera-house in the 
Palais Poyal was burnt down when he had been there 
a little over a month, and the representations were 
transferred to the Salle des Machines, in the Tuileries. 
The equestrian statue of Louis XA 7 ". was set up in the 
Place to which it gav3 its name (where the Luxor column 
now stands, in the Place de la Concorde) amidst the 
jeers and insults of the mob, who declared it would 
never be got to pass the hotel of Madame de Pompadour. 
How much or how little of all this touched Gibbon, we 
do not know. We do know one thing, that his English 
clothes were unfashionable and looked very foreign, the 
French being " excessively long-waisted.'' Doubtless 
his scanty purse could not afford a new outfit, such as 
AValpole two years afterwards, under the direction of 
Lady Hertford, promptly procured. On the 8th of May 
he hurried off to Lausanne. 1 

His ultimate object was Italy. But he wisely re- 
solved to place a period of solid study between tho 
lively dissipation of Paris and his classic pilgrimage. 
He knew the difference between seeing things he had 
read about and reading about things after he had seen 
them ; how the mind, charged with associations of famous 
scenes, is delicately susceptible of impressions, and how 

1 The chronicle of events which occurred during Gibbon's sojourn 
in Paris will be found in the interesting Memoires de Bachaamoni. 



iv.] THE ITALIAN JOURNEY. 51 

rapidly old musings take form and colour, when 
stirred by outward realities ; and contrariwise, how slow 
and inadequate is the effort to reverse this process, and 
to clothe with memories, monuments and sites over 
which the spirit has not sent a halo of previous medi- 
tation. So he settled down quietly at Lausanne for the 
space of nearly a year, and commenced a most austere 
and systematic course of reading on the antiquities of 
Italy. The list of learned works which he perused 
" with his pen in his hand " is formidable, and fills a 
quarto page. But he went further than this, and com- 
piled an elaborate treatise on the nations, provinces, and 
towns of ancient Italy (which we still have) digested in 
alphabetical order, in which every Latin author, from 
Plautus to Rutilius, is laid under contribution for 
illustrative passages, which are all copied out in full. 
This laborious work was evidently Gibbon's own guide- 
book in his Italian travels, and one sees not only 
what an admirable preparation it was for the object in 
view, but what a promise it contained of that scrupulous 
thoroughness which was to be his mark as an historian. 
His mind was indeed rapidly maturing, and becoming 
conscious in what direction its strength lay. 

His account of his first impressions of Home has 
been often quoted, and deserves to be so again. " My 
temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the 
enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to 
affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can 
neither forget nor express the strong emotions which 
agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the 
Eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod with a 
lofty step the ruins of the Forum. Each memorable spot 
where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was 
3* 



52 GIBBON. [chap. 

at once present to my eye, and several days of intoxi- 
cation were lost and enjoyed before I could descend to a 
cool and minute examination. " He gave eighteen weeks to 
the study of Rome only, and six to Naples, and we may 
rest assured that he made good use of his time. But 
what makes this visit to Rome memorable in his life 
and in literary history is that it was the occasion and 
date of the first conception of his great work. " It was 
at Rome, on the 15th October, 1764, as I sat musing 
amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted 
friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, 
that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city 
first started to my mind." The scene, the contrast of 
the old religion and the new, the priests of Christ 
replacing the flamens of Jupiter, the evensong of 
Catholic Rome swelling like a dirge over the prostrate 
Pagan Rome might well concentrate in one grand 
luminous idea the manifold hut unconnected thoughts 
with which his mind had so long been teeming. Gibbon 
had found his work, which was destined to fill the 
remainder of his life. Henceforth there is a fixed 
centre around which his thoughts and musings cluster 
spontaneously. Difficulties and interruptions are not 
wanting. The plan then formed is not taken in hand 
at once ; on the contrary, it is contemplated at "an awful 
distance" ; but it led him on like a star guiding his 
steps, till he reached his appointed goal. 

After crossing the Alps on his homeward journey, 
Gibbon had had some thoughts of visiting the southern 
provinces of France. But when he reached Lyons he 
found letters "expressive of some impatience " for his 
return. Though he does not exactly say as much, we 
snay justly conclude that the elder Gibbon's pecuniary 



iv.] THE ITALIAN JOUftNEY. 53 

difficulties were beginning to be oppressive. So the 
traveller, with the dutifulness that he ever showed to 
his father, at once bent his steps northward. Again he 
passed through Paris, and the place had a new attraction 
in his eyes in the person of Mdlle. Curchod, now become 
Madame Necker, and wife of the great financier. 

This perhaps will be the most convenient place to 
notice and estimate a certain amount of rather spiteful 
gossip, of which Gibbon was the subject in Switzerland 
about this time. Rousseau and his friend Moultou have 
preserved it for us, and it is probable that it has lost 
none of its pungency in passing through the hands of 
the latter. The substance of it is this : — that in the 
year 1763, when Gibbon revisited Lausanne, as we 
have seen, Susanne Curchod was still in a pitiable 
state of melancholy and well nigh broken-hearted at 
Gibbon's manifest coldness, which we know he considered 
to be " friendship and esteem." Whether he even saw 
her on this visit cannot be considered certain, but it is 
at least highly probable. Be that as it may : this is the 
picture of her condition as drawn by Moultou in a letter 
to Rousseau : " How sorry I am for our poor Mdlle. 
Curchod ! Gibbon, whom she loves, and to whom I know 
she has sacrificed some excellent matches, has come to 
Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of 
his old passion as she is far from cure. She has written 
me a letter that makes my heart ache." Rousseau says 
in reply, " He who does not appreciate Mdlle. Curchod 
is not worthy of her ; he who appreciates her and 
separates himself from her is a man to be despised. 
She does not know what she wants. Gibbon serves her 
better than her own heart. I would rather a hundred 
times that he left her poor and free among you than 



54 GIBBON. [chap. 

that he should take her off to be rich and miserable in 
England." One does not quite see how Gibbon could 
have acted to the contentment of Jean-Jacques. For 
not taking Mdlle. Curchod to England — as we may pre- 
sume he would have done if he had married her — he 
is contemptible. Yet if he does take her he will 
make her miserable, and Rousseau would rather a 
hundred times he left her alone — precisely what he was 
doing ; but then he was despicable for doing it. The 
question is whether there is not a good deal of exaggera- 
tion in all this. Only a year after the tragic condition 
in which Moultou describes Mdlle. Curchod she married 
M. Necker, and became devoted to her husband. A few 
months after she married Necker she cordially invited 
Gibbon to her house every day of his sojourn in 
Paris. If Gibbon had behaved in the unworthy way 
asserted, if she had had her feelings so profoundly 
touched and lacerated as Moultou declares, would she, or 
even could she, have acted thus? If she was conscious 
of being wronged, and he was conscious — as he must have 
been — of having acted basely, or at least unfeelingly, is 
it not as good as certain that both parties would have 
been careful to see as little of each other as possible % 
A broken-off love-match, even without complication of 
unworthy conduct on either side, is generally an effective 
bar to further intercourse. But in this case the inter- 
course is renewed on the very first opportunity, and 
never dropped till the death of one of the persons 
concerned. 

Two letters have been preserved of Gibbon and 
Madame Necker respectively, nearly of the same date, 
and both referring to this rather delicate topic of their 
first interviews after her marriage. Gibbon writes to 



iv.] THE ITALIAN JOUKNEY. 55 

his friend Holroyd, " The Curchod (Madame Keeker) 
I saw in Paris. She was very fond of me, and the 
husband particularly civil. Could they insult me more 
cruelly % Ask me every evening to supper, go to bed 
and leave me alone with his wife — what impertinent 
secuiity! It is making an old lover of mighty little 
consequence. She is as handsome as ever, and much 
genteeler ; seems pleased with her wealth rather than 
proud of it. I was exalting Nanette dTllens's good luck 
and the fortune " (this evidently refers to some common 
acquaintance, who had changed her name to advantage). 
" ' What fortune,' she said with an air of contempt : — 
'not above twenty thousand livres a year.' I smiled, 
and she caught herself immediately, ' What airs I 
give myself in despising twenty thousand livres a year, 
who a year ago looked upon eight hundred as the summit 
of my wishes.' " 

Let us turn to the lady's account of the same 
scenes. " I do not know if I told you," she writes to 
a friend at Lausanne, " that I have seen Gibbon, and it 
has given me more pleasure than I know how to express. 
Not indeed that I letain any sentiment for a man who 
I think does not deserve much " (this little toss of 
pique or pride need not mislead us) ; " but my feminine 
vanity could not have had a more complete and honest 
triumph. He stayed two weeks in Paris, and I had him 
every day at my house ; he has become soft, yielding, 
humble, decorous to a fault. He was a constant witness 
of my husband's kindness, wit, and gaiety, and made 
me remark for the first time, by his admiration for 
wealth, the opulence with which I am surrounded, and 
which up to this moment had only produced a dis- 
agreeable impression upon me." Considering the very 



56 GIBBON. [chap. 

different points of view of the writers, these letters are 
remarkably in unison. The solid fact of the daily visits 
is recorded in both. It is easy to gather from Madame 
Necker's letter that she was very glad to show Mr. 
Gibbon that for going farther and not marrying him 
she had not fared worse. The rather acid allusion to 
"opulence'' is found in both letters: but much more 
pronounced in hers than in his. Each hints that the 
other thought too much of wealth. But he does so with 
delicacy, and only by implication ; she charges him 
coarsely with vulgar admiration for it. We may reason- 
ably suspect that riches had been the subject of not 
altogether smooth conversation between them, in the later 
part of the evening, perhaps, after M. Necker had retired 
in triumph to bed. One might even fancy that there 
was a tacit allusion by Madame Necker to the dialogue 
recorded by Gibbon to Holroyd, when his smile checked 
her indirect pride in her own wealth, and that she 
remembered that smile with just a touch of resentment. 
If so, nothing was more natural and comforting than to 
charge him with the failing that he had detected in her. 
But here are the facts. Eight months after her mar- 
riage, Madame Necker admits that she had Gibbon every 
day to her house. He says that she was very cordial. 
She would have it understood that she received him only 
for the sake of gratifying a feminine vanity. Eor her 
own sake one might prefer his interpretation to hers. 
It is difficult to believe that the essentially simple- 
minded Madame Necker would have asked a man every 
day to her house merely to triumph over him ; and 
more difficult still to believe that the man would have 
gone if such had been the object. A little tartness in 
these first interviews, following on a relation of some 






iv.] THE ITALIAN JOUIiNEY. 57 

amb"guity, cannot surprise one. But it was not the 
dominant ingredient, or the interviews must have ceased 
of their own accord. In any case few will admit that 
either of the persons concerned would have written as 
they did if Moultou's statement were correct. In 
neither epistle is there any trace of a grand passion 
felt or slighted. We discover the much lower level 
of vanity and badinage. And the subsequent relations 
of Gibbon and Madame Necker all tend to prove that 
this was the real one. 



CHAPTER Y. 

LITERARY SCHEMES. — THE HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND. — 

DISSERTATION ON THE SIXTH ^NEID. FATHER'S DEATH. 

SETTLEMENT IN LONDON. 

Gibbon now (June, 1765) returned to his father's house, 
and remained there till the latter's death in 1770. He 
describes these five years as having been the least 
pleasant and satisfactory of his whole life. The reasons 
were not far to seek. The unthrifty habits of the elder 
Gibbon were now producing their natural result. He 
was saddled with debt, from which two mortgages, 
readily consented to by his son, and the sale of the 
house at Putney, only partially relieved him. Gibbon 
now began to fear that he had an old age of poverty 
before him. He had pursued knowledge with single- 
hearted loyalty, and now became aware that from a 
worldly point of view knowledge is not often a profitable 
investment. A more dejecting discovery cannot be made 
by the sincere scholar. He is conscious of labour and 
protracted effort, which the prosperous professional 
man and tradesman who pass him on their road to 
wealth with a smile of scornful pity have never known. 
He has forsaken comparatively all for knowledge, and 
the busy world meets him with a blank stare, and surmises 
shrewdly that he is but an idler, with an odd taste for 



ch. v.] LITERARY SCHEMES. 59 

wasting his time over books. It says much for 
Gibbon's robustness of spirit that he did not bre&£ 
down in these trying years, that he did not weakly take 
fright at his prospect, and make hasty and violent efforts 
to mend it. On the contrary, he remained steadfast and 
true to the things of the mind. With diminished cheer- 
fulness perhaps, but with no abatement of zeal, he pur- 
sued his course and his studies, thereby proving that he 
belonged to the select class of the strong and worthy 
who, penetrated with the loveliness of science, will not 
be turned away from it. 

His first effort to redeem the time was a project of 
a history of Switzerland. His choice was decided by 
two circumstances : (1) his love for a country which he 
had made his own by adoption ; (2) by the fact that he 
had in his friend Deyverdun, a fellow-worker who could 
render him most valuable assistance. Gibbon never 
knew German, which is not surprising when we reflect 
what German literature amounted to, in those days ; 
and he soon discovered that the most valuable authori- 
ties of his projected work were in the German 
language. But Deyverdun was a perfect master of 
that tongue, and translated a mass of documents for 
the use of his friend. They laboured for two years 
in collecting materials, before Gibbon felt himself 
justified in entering on the " more agreeable task of 
composition." And even then he considered the pre- 
paration insufficient, as no doubt it was. He felt he 
could not do justice to his subject ; uninformed as he 
was " by the scholars and statesmen, and remote from 
the archives and libraries of the Swiss republic." Such 
a beginning was not of good augury for the success of 
the undertaking. He never wrote more than about 
E 



60 GIBBON. [chap. 

sixty quarto pages of the projected work, and these, as 
they were in French, were submitted to the judgment of 
a literary society of foreigners in London, before whom 
the MS. was read. The author was unknown, and 
Gibbon attended the meeting, and thus listened without 
being observed " to the free strictures and unfavourable 
sentence of his judges." He admits that the momentary 
sensation was painful ; but the condemnation was 
ratified by his cooler thoughts : and he declares that he 
did not regret the loss of a slight and superficial essay, 
though it "had cost some expense, much labour, and 
more time." He says in his Memoirs that he burnt the 
sheets. But this, strange to say, was a mistake on his 
part. They were found among his papers after his 
death, and though not published by Lord Sheffield in 
the first two volumes of his Miscellaneous Works, which 
the latter edited in 1796, they appeared in the supple- 
mental third volume which came out in 1815. We thus 
can judge for ourselves of their value. One sees at 
once why and how they failed to satisfy their author's 
mature judgment. They belong to that style of histori- 
cal writing which consists in the rhetorical transcription 
and adornment of the original authorities, but in which 
the writer never gets close enough to his subject to 
apply the touchstone of a clear and trenchant criticism. 
Such criticism indeed was not common in Switzerland 
in his day, and one cannot blame Gibbon for not antici- 
pating the researches of modern investigators. But his 
historical sense was aroused to suspicion by the story of 
William Tell, which he boldly sets down as a fable. 
Altogether, one may pronounce the sketch to be pleasantly 
written in a flowing, picturesque narrative, and showing 
immense advance in style beyond the essay on the Study 



v.] LITERARY SCHEMES. 61 

• 

of Literature. David Hume, to whom he submitted it, 
urged him to persevere, and the advice was justified 
under the circumstances, although one cannot now 
regret that it was not followed. 

After the failure of this scheme Gibbon, still in con- 
nection with Deyverdun, planned a periodical work under 
the title of Memoires Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne. 
Only two volumes ever appeared, and the speculation 
does not seem to have met with much success. Gibbon 
" presumes to say that their merit was superior to their 
reputation, though they produced more reputation than 
emolument." The first volume is executed with evident 
pains, and gives a fair picture of the literary and social 
condition of England at the time. The heavy review 
articles are interspersed with what is intended to be 
lighter matter on the fashions, foibles, and prominent 
characters of the day. Gibbon owns the authorship of 
the first article on Lord Lyttelton's history of Henry 
the Second, and his hand is discernible in the account 
of the fourth volume of Lardner's work On the Credi- 
bility of the Gospel History. The first has no merit 
beyond a faithful report. The latter is written with 
much more zest and vigour, and shows the interest that 
he already took in Christian antiquities. Other articles, 
evidently from the pen of Deyverdun, on the English 
theatre and Beau Nash of Bath, are the liveliest in the 
collection. The magazine was avowedly intended for" 
Continental readers, and might have obtained success 
if it had been continued long enough. But it died 
before it had time to make itself known. 1 

1 Two volumes appeared of the Memoires Litteraires. Of these 
only the first is to be found in the British Museum. It is a small 
12mo, containing 230 pages. Here is the Table des Matieres ; — (1) 



62 GIBBON. [chap. 

When the Memoires Litteraires collapsed Gibbon was 
again left without a definite object to concentrate his 
energy, and with his work still to seek. One might 
wonder why he did not seriously prepare for the Decline 
and Fall. It must have been chiefly at this time that 
it was "contemplated at an awful distance," perhaps 
even with numbing doubt whether the distance would 
ever be lessened and the work achieved, or even begun. 
The probability is he had too little peace of mind to 
undertake anything that required calm and protracted 
labour. " While so many of my acquaintance were 
married, or in Parliament, or advancing with a rapid 
step in the various roads of honour or fortune I stood 
alone, immovable, and insignificant. . . . The progress 
and the knowledge of our domestic disorders aggravated 
my anxiety, and I began to apprehend that in my old 
age I might be left without the fruits of either industry 
or inheritance." Perhaps a reasonable apprehension of 
poverty is more paralysing than the reality. In the 
latter case prompt action is so imperatively commanded 
that the mind has no leisure for the fatal indulgence of 
regrets ; but when indigence seems only imminent, and 
has not yet arrived, a certain lethargy is apt to be pro- 
duced out of which only the most practical characters can 
rouse themselves, and these are not, as a rule, scholars 
by nature. We need not be surprised that Gibbon 

Histoire de Henri II., par Milord Lyttelton ; (2) Le Nouveau 
Guide de Bath. ; (3) Essai sur l'Histoire de la Societe Civile, par 
M. Ferguson ; (4) Conclusions des Memoires de Miss Sydney 
Bidulph ; Theologie (5) Becueil des Temoignages Anciens, par 
Lardner ; (6) Le Confessional ; (7) Transactions Philosophiques ; 
(8) Le Gouverneur, par D. L. F. Spectacles, Beaux Arts, ISTouvelles 
Litteraires. 



v.] DISSERTATION Otf THE SIXTH .ENEIp. 63 

during these years did nothing serious, and postponed 
undertaking his great work. The inspiration needed to 
accomplish such a long and arduous course as it implied 
could not be kindled in a mind harassed by pecuniary 
cares. The fervent heat of a poet's imagination may 
glow as brightly in poverty as in opulence, but the 
gentle yet prolonged enthusiasm of the historian is 
likely to be quenched when the resources of life are too 
insecure. 1 

It is perhaps not wholly fanciful to suspect that 
Gibbon's next literary effort was suggested and de- 
termined by the inward discomposure he felt at this 
time. By nature he was not a controversialist ; not that 
he wanted the abilities to support that character, but 
his mind was too full, fertile, and fond of real know- 
ledge to take much pleasure in the generally barren 
occupation of gainsaying other men. But at this point 
in his life he made an exception, and an unprovoked ex- 
ception. When he wrote his famous vindication of the 
first volume of the Decline and Fall he was acting in 
self-defence, and repelling savage attacks upon his his- 
torical veracity. But in his Critical Observations on the 
Sixth Booh of the JEneid he sought controversy for its 
own sake, and became a polemic — shall we say out of 
gaiety or bitterness of heart % That inward unrest 
easily produces an aggressive spirit is a matter of com- 
mon observation, and it may well have been that in 
attacking Warburton he sought a diversion from the 
worry of domestic cares. Be that as it may, his Obset- 

1 Scholarship has been frequently cultivated amidst great poverty ; 
but from the time of Thucydides, the owner of mines, to Grote, 
the banker, historians seem to have been in, at least, easy circum- 
stances. 



64 GIBBON. [CHAP . 

vations are the most pungent and dashing effusion he 
ever allowed himself. It was his first effort in English 
prose, and it is doubtful whether he ever managed hia 
mother tongue better, if indeed he ever managed it so 
well. The little tract is written with singular spirit 
and rapidity of style. It is clear, trenchant, and direct 
to a fault. It is indeed far less critical than polemical, 
and shows no trace of lofty calm, either moral or in- 
tellectual. We are not repelled much by his eagerness 
to refute and maltreat his opponent. That was not 
alien from the usages of the time, and Warburton at 
least had no right to complain of such a style of con- 
troversy. But there is no width and elevation of view. 
The writer does not carry the discussion up to a higher 
level, and dominate his adversary from a superior stand-, 
point. Controversy is always ephemeral and vulgar, un- 
less it can rise to the discussion and establishment of 
facts and principles valuable for themselves, independ- 
ently of the particular point at issue. It is this quality 
which has made the master-works of Chillingworth 
and Bentley supereminent. The particular point for 
which the writers contended is settled or forgotten. 
But in moving up to that point they touched— such was 
their large discourse of reason— on topics of perennial 
interest, did such justice, though only in passing, to 
certain other truths, that they are gratefully remembered 
ever after. Thus Bentley's dissertation on Phalaris is 
read, not for the main thesis— proof of the spuriousness 
of the letters— but for the profound knowledge and ad- * 
mirable logic with which subsidiary positions are main- 
tained on the way to it. Tried by this standard, and he 
deserves to be tried by a high standard, Gibbon fails 
not much, but entirely. The Observations are rarely, 



v.] HIS FATHER'S DEATH. 65 

if ever, quoted as an authority of weight by any one 
engaged on classical or Yirgilian literature. This arises 
from the attitude of the writer, who is nearly solely 
occupied with establishing negative conclusions that 
./Eneas was not a lawgiver, that the Sixth ^Eneid is not 
an allegory, that Virgil had not been initiated in the 
Eleusinian mysteries when he wrote it, and so forth. 
Indeed the best judges now hold that he has not done 
full justice to the grain of truth that was to be found 
in Warburton's clumsy and prolix hypothesis. 1 It 
should be added that Gibbon very candidly admits and 
regrets the acrimonious style of the pamphlet, and con- 
demns still more "in a personal attack his cowardly 
concealment of his name and character." 

The Observations were the last work which Gibbon 
published in his father's lifetime. His account of the 
latter's death (November 10, 1770) is feelingly written, 
and shows the affectionate side of his own nature to 
advantage. He acknowledges his father's failings, his 
weakness and inconstancy, but insists that they were 
compensated by the virtues of the head and heart, and 
the warmest sentiments of honour and humanity. " His 
graceful person, polite address, gentle manners, and un- 
affected cheerfulness recommended him to the favour 
of every company." And Gibbon recalls with emotion 
"the pangs of shame, tenderness, and self-reproach" 

1 Conington, Introduction to the Sixth JEJneid. "A reader of the 
present day will, I think, be induced to award the palm of learning 
and ingenuity to Warburton." "The language and imagery of the 
sixth book more than once suggest that Virgil intended to embody 
in his picture the poetical view of that inner side of ancient religion 
which the mysteries may be supposed to have presented." — Sugges- 
tion on the Study of the yEneid, by H. Nettleship, p. 13. 



66 GlBBOtf. [oha*. 

which preyed on his father's mind at the prospect, no 
doubt, of leaving an embarrassed estate and precarious 
fortune to his son and widow. He had no taste for study 
in the fatal summer of 1770, and declares that he would 
have been ashamed if he had. "I submitted to the 
order of nature," he says, in words which recall his 
resignation on losing his mistress—" I submitted to the 
order of nature, and my grief was soothed by the con- 
scious satisfaction that I had discharged all the duties 
of filial piety." We see Gibbon very fairly in this 
remark. He had tenderness, steady and warm attach- 
ments, but no passion. 

Nearly two years elapsed after his father's death, 
before he was able to secure from the wreck of his 
estate a sufficient competence to establish himself in 
London. His house was No. 7, Bentinck Street, near 
Manchester Square, then a remote suburb close to the 
country fields. His housekeeping was that of a solitary 
bachelor, who could afford an occasional dinner-party. 
Though not absolutely straitened in means, we shall pre- 
sently see that he was never quite at his ease in money 
matters while he remained in London. But he had now 
freedom and no great anxieties, and he began seriously 
to contemplate the execution of his great work. 

Gibbon, as we have seen, looked back with little satis- 
faction on the five years between his return from his 
travels and his father's death. They are also the years 
during which his biographer is able to follow him with 
the least certainty. Hardly any of his letters which 
refer to that period have been preserved, and he has 
glided rapidly over it in his Memoirs. Yet it was, in 
other respects besides the matter of pecuniary troubles, 
a momentous epoch in his life. The peculiar views 



: 



v.] CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. 67 

which he adopted and partly professed on religion must 
have been formed then. But the date, the circumstance, 
and the occasion are left in darkness. Up to December 
18, 1763, Gibbon was evidently a believer. In an entry 
in his private journal under that date he speaks of a Com- 
munion Sunday at Lausanne as affording an "edifying 
spectacle," on the ground that there is " neither business 
nor parties, and they interdict even whist " on that day. 
How soon after this his opinions began to change, it is 
impossible to say. But we are conscious of a markedly 
different tone in the Observations, and a sneer at "the 
ancient alliance between the avarice of the priests and 
the credulity of the people " is in the familiar style of 
the Deists from Toland to Chubb. There is no evidence 
of his familiarity with the widely diffused works of the 
freethinkers, and as far as I am aware he does not 
quote or refer to them even once. But they could hardly 
have escaped his notice. Still his strong historic sense 
and solid erudition would be more likely to be repelled 
than attracted by their vague and inaccurate scholar- 
ship, and chimerical theories of the light of Nature. 
Still we know that he practically adopted, in the end, 
at least the negative portion of these views, and the 
question is, When did he do so 1 His visit to Paris, 
and the company that he frequented there, might suggest 
that as a probable date of his change of opinions. But 
the entry just referred to was subsequent by several 
months to that visit, and we may with confidence assume 
that no freethinker of the eighteenth century would 
pronounce the austerities of a Communion Sunday in 
a Calvinist town an edifying spectacle. It is probable 
that his relinquishing of dogmatic faith was gradual, 
and for a time unconscious. It was an age of tepid 
4 






68 GIBBON. [ch. v. 

belief, except among the Nonjurors and Methodists ; and 
with neither of these groups could he have had the least 
sympathy. His acquaintance with Hume, and his par- 
tiality for the writings of Bayle, are more probable 
sources of a change of sentiment which was in a way 
predestined by natural bias and cast of mind. Any 
occasion would serve to precipitate the result. In any 
case, this result had been attained some years before the 
publication of the first volume of the Decline and Fall, 
in 1776. Referring to his preparatory studies for the 
execution of that work, he says, " As I believed, and as 
I still believe, that the propagation of the Gospel and 
the triumph of the Church are inseparably connected 
with the decline of the Roman monarchy, I weighed the 
causes and effects of the revolution, and contrasted the , 
narratives and apologies of the Christians themselves 
with the glances of candour or enmity which the pagans 
have cast on the rising sects. The Jewish and heathen 
testimonies, as they are collected and illustrated by Dr. 
Lardner, directed without superseding my search of the 
originals, and in an ample dissertation on the miraculous 
darkness of the Passion I privately drew my conclusions 
from the silence of an unbelieving age." Here we have 
the argument which concludes the sixteenth chapter 
distinctly announced. But the previous travail of spirit 
is not indicated. Gibbon has marked with precision the 
stages of his conversion to Romanism. But the follow- 
ing chapters of the history of his religious opinions he 
has not written, or he has suppressed them, and we can « 
only vaguely guess their outline. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LIFE IN LONDON. PAELIAMENT. THE BOARD OF TRADE. 

THE DECLINE AND FALL. MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE. 

Gibbon's settlement in London as master in his own 
house did not come too soon. A few more years of 
anxiety and dependence, such as he had passed of late 
with his father in the country, would probably have 
dried up the spring of literary ambition and made him 
miss his career. He had no tastes to fit him for a 
country life. The pursuit of farming only pleased him 
in Virgil's Georgics. He seems neither to have liked 
nor to have needed exercise, and English rural sports 
had no charms for him. " I never handled a gun, I 
seldom mounted a horse, and my philosophic walks 
were soon terminated by a shady bench, where I was 
long detained by the sedentary amusement of reading 
or meditation." He was a born citadin. "Never, " he 
writes to his friend Holroyd, " never pretend to allure 
me by painting in odious colours the dust of London. 
I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald it 
is to visit you, and not your trees." His ideal was to 
devote the morning, commencing early — at seven, say — to 
study, and the afternoon and evening to society and 
recreation, not " disdaining the innocent amusement of a 



70 GIBBON. [chaf. 

game at cards." And this plan of a happy life he very 
fairly realised in his little house in Bentinck Street. 
The fetters that we have of his relating to this period are 
buoyant with spirits and self- congratulation at his happy 
lot. He writes to his stepmother that he is every day 
more satisfied with his present mode of life, which he 
always believed was most calculated to make him happy. 
The stable and moderate stimulus of congenial society, 
alternating with study, was what he liked. The excite- 
ment and dissipation of a town life, which purchase 
pleasure to-day at the expense of fatigue and disgust 
to-morrow, were as little to his taste as the amusements 
of the country. In 1772, when he settled in London, 
he was young in years, but he was old in tastes, and he 
enjoyed himself with the complacency often seen in < 
healthy old men. " My library," he writes to Holroyd 
in 1773, " Kensington Gardens, and a few parties with 
new acquaintance, among whom I reckon Goldsmith and 
Sir Joshua Reynolds," (poor Goldsmith was to die the 
year following), "fill up my time, and the monster 
ennui preserves a very respectful distance. By the 
by, your friends Batt, Sir John Russell, and Lascelles 
dined with me one day before they set off : for I some- 
times give the prettiest little dinner in the world." One 
can imagine Gibbon, the picture of plumpness and 
content, doing the honours of his modest household. 
Still he was never prominent in society, even after 
the publication of his great work had made him 
famous. Lord Sheffield says that his conversation was 
superior to his writings, and in a circle of intimate 
friends it is probable that this was true. But in the 
free encounter of wit and argument, the same want of 
readiness that made him silent in parliament would 



vi.] LIFE IN LONDON. 71 

most likely restrict his conversational power. It may be 
doubted if there is a striking remark or saying of his 
on record. His name occurs in Boswell, but nearly 
always as a persona muta. Certainly the arena where 
Johnson and Burke encountered each other was not 
fitted to bring out a shy and not very quick man. 
Against Johnson he manifestly harboured a sort of 
grudge, and if he ever felt the weight of Ursa Major's 
paw it is not surprising. 

He rather oddly preserved an instance of his conver- 
sational skill, as if aware that he would not easily get 
credit for it. The scene was in Paris. " At the table of 
my old friend M. de Foncemagne, I was involved in a 
dispute with the Abbe de Mably ... As I might be 
partial in my own cause, I shall transcribe the words of 
an unknown critic. ' You were, my dear Theodon, at 
M. de Foncemagne's house, when the Abbe de Mably and 
Mr. Gibbon dined there along with a number of guests. 
The conversation ran almost entirely on history. The 
Abbe, being a profound politician, turned it while at 
dessert on the administration of affairs, and as by genius 
and temper, and the habit of admiring Livy, he values 
only the republican system, he began to boast of the 
excellence of republics, being well persuaded that the 
learned Englishman would approve of all he said and 
admire the profoundity of genius that had enabled a 
Frenchman to discover all these advantages. But Mr. 
Gibbon, knowing by experience the inconveniences of a 
popular government, was not at all of his opinion, and 
generously took up the defence of monarchy. -The 
Abbe wished to convince him out of Livy, and by some 
arguments drawn from Plutarch in favour of the 
Spartans. Mr. Gibbon, being endowed with a most 



72 GIBBON. [chap. 

excellent memory, and having all events present to his 
mind, soon got the command of the conversation. The 
Abbe grew angry, they lost possession of themselves, 
and said hard things of each other. The Englishman 
retaining his native coolness, watched for his advantages, 
and pressed the Abbe with increasing success in pro- 
portion as he was more disturbed by passion. The 
conversation grew warmer, and was broken off by 
M. de Foncemagne's rising from table and passing into 
the parlour, where no one was tempted to renew it." 
But if not brilliant in society, he was very repandu, and 
was welcomed in the best circles. He was a member of 
Boodle's, White's, Brooks's, and Almack's, 1 and " there 
were few persons in the literary or political world to 
whom he was a stranger." It is to be regretted that the 
best sketch of him at this period borders on caricature. 
" The learned Gibbon," says Colman, "was a curious 
counterbalance to the learned (may I not say the less 
learned) Johnson. Their manners and tastes, both in 
writing and conversation, were as different as their 
habiliments. On the day I first sat down with Johnson 
in his rusty-brown suit and his black worsted stockings, 
Gibbon was placed opposite to me in a suit of flowered 
velvet, with a bag and sword. Each had his measured 
phraseology, and Johnson's famous parallel between 
Dryden and Pope might be loosely parodied in reference 
to himself and Gibbon. Johnson's style was grand, and 
Gibbon's elegant : the stateliness of the former was 
sometimes pedantic, and the latter was occasionally 
finical. Johnson marched to kettledrums and trumpets, 

1 Not the assembly-room of that name, hut a gaming-club where 
the play was high. I find no evidence that Gibbon ever yielded to 
the prevalent passion for gambling. 



vi.] LIFE IN LONDON. 73 

Gibbon moved to flutes and hautboys. Johnson hewed 

passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levelled walks 

through parks and gardens. Mauled as I had been by 

Johnson, Gibbon poured balm upon my bruises by 

condescending once or twice in the course of the 

evening to talk with me. The great historian was 

I light and playful, suiting his matter to the capacity of 

the boy : but it was done more mo— still his mannerism 

[prevailed, still he tapped his snuff-box, still he smirked 

; and smiled, and rounded his periods with the same air 

of good-breeding, as if he were conversing with men. 

His mouth, mellifluous as Plato's, was a round hole 

nearly in the centre of his visage." (Quoted in Croker's 

Boswell.) 

j Now and then he even joins in a masquerade, " the 
finest thing ever seen," which costs two thousand 
guineas. But the chief charm of it to him seems to 
have been the pleasure that it gave to his Aunt Porten. 
These little vanities are however quite superficial, and 
are never allowed to interfere with work. 

Now indeed he was no loiterer. In three years 
after his settlement in London he had produced the 
first volume of the Decline and Fall: an amount of 
diligence which will not be underrated by those who 
appreciate the vast difference between commencing 
and continuing an undertaking of that magnitude. 
|At the outset," he says, "all was dark and doubtful; 
sventhe title of the work, the true sera of the decline 
and fall of the empire, the limits of the Introduction, 
the division of the chapters, and the order of the 
narrative,— and I was often tempted to cast away the 
labour of seven years ; "—alternations no doubt of 
lope and despair familiar to every sincere and competent 



74 GIBBON. [chap. 

student. But he had taken the best and only reliable 
means of securing himself from the danger of these 
fluctuations of spirit. He finished his reading and pre- 
paration before he began to write, and when he at last 
put pen to paper his course lay open before him, with no 
fear of sudden and disquieting stoppages arising from 
imperfect knowledge and need of further inquiry. It 
is a pity that we cannot follow the elaboration of the 
work in detail. That portion of his Memoirs in which 
he speaks of it is very short and fragmentary, and the 
defect is not supplied by his letters. He seems to have 
worked with singular ease and mastery of his subject, 
and never to have felt his task as a strain or a fatigue. 
Even his intimate friends were not aware that he was 
engaged on a work of such magnitude, and it is amusing 
to see his friend Holroyd warn him against a hasty and 
immature publication when he learned that the book 
was in the press. He had apparently heard little of 
it before. This alone would show with what ease and 
smoothness Gibbon must have worked. He had excel- 
lent health — a strange fact after his sickly childhood ; 
society unbent his mind instead of distracting it ; his 
stomach was perfect — perhaps too good, as about this 
time he began to be admonished by the gout. He never 
seems to have needed change. " Sufficient for the 
summer is the evil thereof, viz., one distant country 
excursion." There was an extraordinary difference in 
this respect between the present age and those which 
went before it ; restlessness and change of scene have 
become almost a necessity of life with us, whereas our 
ancestors could continue healthy and happy for months 
and years without stirring from home. What is there 
to explain the change 1 We must not pretend that we 



vi.] LIFE IN LONDON. 75 

work harder than they did. 1 However, Gibbon was 
able to keep himself in good condition with his long 
spell of work in the morning, and his dinner-parties 
at home or elsewhere in the afternoon, and to have 
kept at home as much as he could. Whenever he 
went away to the country, it was on invitations which 
he could not well refuse. The result was a leisurely, 
unhasting fulness of achievement, calm stretches of 
thorough and contented work, which have left their 
marks on the Decline and Fall. One of its charms is 
a constant good humour and complacency ; not a sign is 
visible that the writer is pressed for time, or wants to 
get his performance out of hand ; but, on the contrary, 
a calm lingering over details, sprightly asides in the 
notes, which the least hurry would have suppressed 
or passed by, and a general impression conveyed of 
thorough enjoyment in the immensity of the labour. 

One would have liked to see this elaboration more 
clearly, to have been allowed a glimpse into his workshop 
while he was so engaged. Unfortunately the editor of his 
journals has selected the relatively unimportant records 
of his earlier studies, and left us in the dark as regards 
this far more interesting period. He was such an inde- 
fatigable diarist that it is unlikely that he neglected to 
keep a journal in this crisis of his studies. But it has 
not been published, and it may have been destroyed. 
All that we have is this short paragraph in his 
Memoirs : — 

" The classics, as low as Tacitus and the younger Pliny and 



1 The most remarkable instance of all is the case of Newton, 
who, according to Dr. "Whewell, resided in Trinity College " for 
thirty-five years without the interruption of a month."— Hist, of 
the Inductive Sciences, vol. ii. book vii. 
F 4* 



76 GIBBON. [char 

Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions. I insensibly 
plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history, and in the 
descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always in 
my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from Dion 
Cassius to Amraianus Marcellinus, from the reign of Trajan to 
the last age of the Western Csesars. The subsidiary rays of 
medals and inscriptions of geography and chronology, were thrown 
on their proper objects, and I applied the collections of Tillemont 
to fix and arrange within my reach the loose and scattered atoms 
of historical information. Through the darkness of the middle 
ages I explored my way in the Annals and Antiquities of Italy 
of the learned Muratori, and diligently compared them with the 
parallel or transverse lines of Sigonius and Maffei, Baronius and 
Pagi, till I almost grasped the ruins of Rome in the fourteenth 
century, without suspecting that this final chapter must be 
attained by the labour of six quartos and twenty years." 

When the time for composition arrived, he showed 
a fastidiousness which was full of good augury. " Three 
times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the 
second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with 
their effect." His hand grew firmer as he advanced. 
But the two final chapters interposed a long delay, and 
needed "three successive revisals to reduce them from a 
volume to their present size." Gibbon spent more time 
over his first volume than over any one of the five which 
followed it. To these he devoted almost regularly two 
years apiece, more or less, whereas the first cost him 
three years — so disproportionately difficult is the start 
in matters of this kind. 

While engaged in the composition of the first volume, 
he became a member of Parliament. One morning at 
half past seven, "as he was destroying an army of 
barbarians," he heard a double rap at his door. It was 
a friend who came to inquire if he was desirous of 



Vi.] HIS POLITICAL CAREER. 77 

entering the House of Commons. The answer may 
be imagined, and he took his seat as member for 
the borough of Liskeard after the general election 
in 1774. 

Gibbon's political career is the side of his history from 
which a friendly biographer would most readily turn 
away. Not that it was exceptionally ignoble or self- 
seeking if tried by the standard of the time, but it was 
altogether commonplace and unworthy of him. The 
fact that he never even once opened his mouth in the 
House is not in itself blameworthy, though disappointing 
in a man of his power. It was indeed laudable enough 
if he had nothing to say. But why had he nothing to 
say? His excuse is timidity and want of readiness. 
We may reasonably assume that the cause lay deeper. 
With his mental vigour he would soon have overcome 
such obstacles if he had really wished and tried to 
overcome them. The fact is that he never tried because 
he never wished. It is a singular thing to say of such a 
man, but nevertheless true, that he had no taste or 
capacity whatever for politics. He lived at one of the 
most exciting periods of our history ; he assisted at 
debates in which constitutional and imperial questions 
of the highest moment were discussed by masters of 
eloquence and state policy, and. he hardly appears to 
have been aware of the fact. It was not that he 
despised politics as Walpole affected to do, or that he 
regarded party struggles as "barbarous and absurd 
faction," as Hume did ; still less did he pass by them 
with the supercilious indifference of a mystic whose 
eyes are fixed on the individual spirit of man as the one 
spring of good and evil. He never rose to the level of 
the ordinary citizen or even partisan, who takes an 



78 GIBBON. [chap. 

exaggerated view perhaps of the importance of the politics 
of the day, but who at any rate thereby shows a sense of 
social solidarity and the claims of civic communion. He 
called himself a Whig, but he had no zeal for Whig 
principles. He voted steadily with Lord North, and 
quite approved of taxing and coercing America into 
slavery ; but he had no high notions of the royal pre- 
rogative, and was lukewarm in this as in everything. 
With such absence of passion one might have expected 
that he would be at least shrewd and sagacious in his 
judgments on politics. But he is nothing of the kind. 
In his familiar letters he reserves generally a few lines 
for parliamentary gossip, amid chat about the weather 
and family business. He never approaches to a broad 
survey of policy, or expresses serious and settled con- 
victions on home or foreign affairs. Throughout the 
American war he never seems to have really made up 
his mind on the nature of the struggle, and the momen- 
tous issues that it involved. Favourable news puts him 
in high spirits, which are promptly cooled by the an- 
nouncement of reverses ; not that he ever shows any 
real anxiety or despondency about the commonwealth. 
His opinions on the subject are at the mercy of the last 
mail. It is disappointing to find an elegant trifler like 
Horace Walpole not only far more discerning in his 
appreciation of such a crisis, but also far more 
patriotically sensitive as to the wisdom of the means 
of meeting it, than the historian of Rome. Gibbon's 
tone often amounts to levity, and he chronicles the most 
serious measures with an unconcern really surprising. 
"In a few days we stop the ports of New England. 
I cannot write volumes : but I am more and more 
convinced that with firmness all may go well : yet I 



vi.] HIS POLITICAL CAREER. 79 

sometimes doubt." (February 8, 1775.) " Something 
will be done this year ; but in the spring the force 
of the country will be exerted to the utmost : Scotch 
Highlanders, Irish Papists, Hanoverians, Canadians, 
Indians, &c, will all in various shapes be employed." 
(August 1, 1775.) " What think you of the season, of 
Siberia is it not? A pleasant campaign in America." 
(January 29, 1776.) At precisely the same time the saga- 
cious coxcomb of Strawberry Hill was writing thus : 
" The times are indeed very serious. Pacification with 
America is not the measure adopted. More regiments 
are ordered thither, and to-morrow a plan, I fear equi- 
valent to a declaration of war, is to be laid before both 
Houses. They are bold ministers methinks who do not 
hesitate on civil war, in which victory may bring ruin, 
and disappointment endanger their heads . . . Acqui- 
sition alone can make burdens palatable, and in a War 
with our own colonies we must inflict instead of acquiring 
them, and we cannot recover them without undoing 
them. I am still to learn wisdom and experience, if 
these things are not so." (Letter to Mann, January 25, 
1775.) "A war with our colonies, which is now 
declared, is a proof how much influence jargon has on 
human actions. A war on our own trade is popular." 
(February 15, 1775.) "The war with America goes on 
briskly, that is as far as voting goes. A great majority 
in both houses is as brave as a mob ducking a pick- 
pocket. They flatter themselves they shall terrify the 
colonies into submission in three months, and are 
amazed to hear that there is no such probability. They 
might as well have excommunicated them, and left it to 
the devil to put the sentence into execution." (February 
18, 1775.) Not only is Walpole's judgment wiser, but the 



80 GIBBON. chap. 

elements of a wise judgment were present to him in a 
way in which they were not so to Gibbon. When the latter 
does attempt a forecast, he shows, as might be expected, 
as little penetration of the future as appreciation of the 
present. Writing from Paris on August 11, 1777, when 
all French society was ablaze with enthusiasm for 
America, and the court just on the point of yielding to 
the current, he is under no immediate apprehensions of 
a war with France, and " would not be surprised if next 
summer the French were to lend their cordial assistance 
to England as the weaker party." The emptiness of 
his letters as regards home politics perhaps admits of a 
more favourable explanation, and may be owing to the 
careful suppression by their editor, Lord Sheffield, of 
everything of real interest. It is impossible to estimate 
the weight of this consideration, but it may be great. 
Still we have a sufficient number of his letters to be 
able to say that on the whole they are neither thought- 
ful nor graphic : they give us neither pictures of events 
nor insight into the times. It must be, however, re- 
membered that Gibbon greatly disliked letter- writing, 
and never wrote unless he was obliged. 

It was no secret that Gibbon wanted a place under 
government. Moderate as his establishment seems to 
have been, it was more expensive than he could afford, 
and he looked, not without warrant, to a supplement of 
income from one of the rich windfalls which in that 
time of sinecures were wont to refresh the spirits of 
sturdy supporters of administration. He had influential 
friends, and even relatives, in and near the government, 
and but for his parliamentary nullity he would probably 
have been provided with a comfortable berth at an 
early period. But his "sincere and silent vote M was 



vi.] THE BOARD OF TRADE. 81 

net valuable enough to command a high price from his 
patrons. Once only was he able to help them with his 
pen, when he drew up, at the request of Lords 
Thurlow and Weymouth, his Memoire Justijicatif, in 
French, in which "he vindicated against the French 
manifesto the justice of the British arms." It was a 
service worthy of a small fee, which no doubt he re- 
ceived. He had to wait till 1779, when he had been five 
years in Parliament, before his cousin Mr. Eliot, end 
his friend Wedderburne, the Attorney- General, were 
able to find him a post as one of the Lords Commissioners 
of Trade and Plantations. The Board of Trade, of 
which he became one of the eight members, survives 
in mortal memory only from being embalmed in the 
bright amber of one of Burke's great speeches. "This 
board, Sir, has had both its original formation and its 
regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and 
in a job its mother brought it forth. . . . This board is 
a sort of temperate bed of influence : a sort of gently 
ripening hothouse, where eight members of Parliament 
receive salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given 
time, in order to mature at a proper season a claim to 
two thousand, granted for doing less ' ' (Speech on Eco- 
nomical Reform). Gibbon, with entire good humour, 
acknowledges the justice of Burke's indictment, and 
says he was "heard with delight, even by those whose 
existence he proscribed." After all, he only enjoyed the 
emolument of his office for three years, and he places 
that emolument at a lower figure than Burke did. He 
could not have received more than between two and 
three thousand pounds of public money ; and when we 
consider what manner of men have fattened on the 
national purse, it would be churlish to grudge that 



82 GIBBOK [chap. 

small sum to the historian of the Decline and Fall. The 
misfortune is that, reasonably or otherwise, doubts were 
raised as to Gibbon's complete straightforwardness and 
honourable adhesion to party ties in accepting office. 
He says himself : " My acceptance of a place provoked 
some of the leaders of opposition with whom I had 
lived in habits of intimacy, and I was most unjustly 
accused of deserting a party in which I had never 
enlisted." There is certainly no evidence that those who 
were most qualified to speak, those who gave him the 
place and reckoned on his vote, ever complained of want 
of allegiance. On the other hand, Gibbon's own letter 
to Edward Elliot, accepting the place, betrays a some- 
what uneasy conscience. He owns that he was far from 
approving all the past measures of the administration, 
even some of those in which he himself had silently 
concurred ; that he saw many capital defects in the 
characters of some of the present ministers, and was 
sorry that in so alarming a situation of public affairs 
the country had not the assistance of several able and 
honest men who were now in opposition. Still, for 
various reasons, he did not consider himself in any way 
implicated, and rather suspiciously concludes with an 
allusion to his pecuniary difficulties and a flourish. 
" The addition of the salary which is now offered will 
make my situation perfectly easy, but I hope that you 
will do me the justice to believe that my mind could not 
be so unless I were conscious of the rectitude of my 
conduct." 

The strongest charge against Gibbon in reference to 
this matter is asserted to come from his friend Fox, in 
this odd form. " In June 1781, Mr. Fox's library came 



to be sold. Amongst his other books the first volume 






vi.] INFIDELITY TO PARTY. 83 

of Mr. Gibbon's history was brought to the hammer. 
In the blank leaf of this was a note in the hand- 
writing of Mr. Fox, stating a remarkable declaration of 
our historian at a well-known tavern in Pall Mall, and 
contrasting it with Mr. Gibbon's political conduct after- 
wards. ' The author,' it observed, ' at Brooks's said 
that there was no salvation for this country until six 
heads of the principal persons in administration ' (Lord 
North being then prime minister) ' were laid upon 
the table. Yet,' as the observation added, ' eleven days 
afterwards this same gentleman accepted a place of a 
lord of trade under these very ministers, and has acted 
with them ever since.' " It is impossible to tell what 
amount of truth there is in this story, and not very 
important to inquire. It rests on the authority of a 
strong personal enemy, and the cordial intimacy which 
ever subsisted between Gibbon and Fox seems to show 
that it was mere calumny. Perhaps the fact that Gibbon 
had really no opinions in politics may have led persons 
of opposite parties to think that he agreed with them 
more than he did, and when he merely followed his own 
interest, they may have inferred that he was deserting 
their principles. After losing his post on the Board of 
Trade he still hoped for Government employ, " either a 
secure seat at the Board of Customs or Excise," or in 
a diplomatic capacity. He was disappointed. If Lord 
Sheffield is to be believed, it was his friend Fox who 
frustrated his appointment as secretary of embassy at 
Paris, when he had been already named to that 
office. 

The way in which Gibbon acted and afterwards spoke 
in reference to the celebrated Coalition gives perhaps 
the best measure of his political calibre. He voted 






84 GIBBON". [chap. 

among the rank and file of Lord North's followers for 
the Coalition with meek subserviency. He speaks of 
a " principle of gratitude " which actuated him on this 
occasion. Lord North had given him his seat, and if a 
man's conscience allows him to think rather of his 
patron than of his country, there is nothing to be said, 
except that his code of political ethics is low. We may 
admit that his vote was pledged; but there is also no 
doubt that any gratitude that there was in the matter 
was stimulated by a lively sense of favours to come. The 
Portland ministry had not been long in office when he 
wrote in the following terms to his friend Deyverdun : 
( " You have not forgotten that I went into Parliament 
-without patriotism and without ambition, and that all 
my views tended to the convenient and respectable 
place of a lord of trade. This situation I at length 
obtained. I possessed it for three years, from 1779 to 
1782, and the net produce, which amounted to 750^. 
sterling, augmented my income to my wants and desires. 
But in the spring of last year the storm burst over 
our heads. Lord North was overthrown, your humble 
servant turned out, and even the Board of Trade, of 
which I was a member, abolished and broken up for 
ever by Mr. Burke's reform. To complete my misfor- 
tunes, I still remain a member of the Lower House. At 
the end of the last Parliament, Mr. Eliot withdrew his 
nomination. But the favour of Lord North facilitated 
my re-election, and gratitude imposed on me the duty of 
making available for his service the rights which I held 
in part from him. That winter we fought under the 
allied standards of Lord North and Mr. Fox: we 
triumphed over Lord Shelburne and the peace, and my 
friend (i.e. Lord North) remounted his steed in the quality 



) vi.] THE COALITION. 85 

of a secretary of state. Now he can easily say to me, 
'It was a great deal for me, it was nothing for you; ' 

, and in spite of the strongest assurances, I have too much 
reason to allow me to have much faith. With great 
genius and very respectable talents, he has now neither 
the title nor the credit of prime minister ; more active 
colleagues carry off the most savoury morsels which 
their voracious creatures immediately devour ; our mis- 

, fortunes and reforms have diminished the number of 

I favours ; either through pride or through indolence I am 
but a bad suitor, and if at last I obtain something, it 
may perhaps be on the eve of a fresh revolution, which 
will in an instant snatch from me that which has cost 

1 me so many cares and pains." 

Such a letter speaks for itself. Gibbon might well 
say that he entered parliament without patriotism and 

I without ambition. The only redeeming feature is the 
almost cynical frankness with which he openly regards 
politics from a personal point of view. However, it may 
be pleaded that the letter was written to a bosom friend 
at a moment of great depression, and when Gibbon's 
pecuniary difficulties were pressing him severely. The 
Coalition promised him a place, and that was enough; 
the contempt for all principle which had brought it 
about was not thought of. But even this minute 
excuse does not apply to the way in which, years after, 
when he was in comfort at Lausanne, he refers to the 
subject in his Memoirs. The light in which the Coali- 
tion deserved to be regarded was clear by that time. 
Yet he speaks of it, not only without blame or regret, 

I but contrives to cast suspicion on the motives of those 
who were disgusted by it, and bestowed their allegiance ^ 

elsewhere. 

■ 



86 GIBBON. [chap. 

" It is not the purpose of this narrative to expatiate on the 
public or secret history of the times : the schism which followed 
the death of the Marquis of Kockingham, the appointment of the 
Earl of Shelbourne, the resignation of Mr. Fox and his famous 
coalition with Lord North. But I may assert with some degree of 
assurance that in their political conflict those great antagonists 
had never felt any personal animosity to each other, that their 
reconciliation was easy and sincere, and that their friendship 
has never been clouded by the shadow of suspicion or jealousy. 
The most violent or venal of their respective followers embraced 
this fair occasion of revolt, but their alliance still commanded a 
majority of the House of Commons, the peace was censured, 
Lord Shelbourne resigned, and the two friends knelt on the 
same cushion to take the oath of secretary of state. From a 
principle of gratitude I adhered to the Coalition ; my vote was 
counted in the day of battle, but I was overlooked in the 
division of the spoil.' ' 

From this we learn that it was only the violent and 
the venal who disapproved of the Coalition. One 
would like to know how Gibbon explained the fact that 
at the general election of 1784 no less than one hundred 
and sixty of the supporters of the Coalition lost their 
seats, and that Fox's political reputation was all but 
irretrievably ruined from this time forward. 

Meanwhile he had not neglected his own proper 
work. The first volume of his history was published in 
February, 1776. It derived, he says, "more credit from 
the name of the shop than from that of the author." In 
the first instance he intended to print only five hundred 
copies, but the number was doubled by the "prophetic 
taste " of his printer, Mr. Strahan. The book was 
received with a burst of applause — it was a succes fou. 
The first impression was exhausted in a few days, and 
a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the 



vi.] PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 87 

demand. The wiser few were as warm in their eulogies 
as the general public. Hume declared that if he had 
not been personally acquainted with the author, he 
should have been surprised by such a performance 
coming from any Englishman in that age. Dr. Robert- 
son, Adam Ferguson, and Horace Walpole joined in 
the chorus. Walpole betrays an amusing mixture of 
admiration and pique at not having found the author 
out before. "I know him a little, and never suspected 
the extent of his talents ; for he is perfectly modest, or 
I want penetration, which I know too ; but I intend to 
know him a great deal more." He oddly enough says 
that Gibbon was the " son of a foolish alderman," which 
shows at least how little the author was known in the 
great world up to this time. Now, however, society 
was determined to know more of him, the surest 
proof, not of merit, but of success. It must have 
been a rather intoxicating moment, but Gibbon had 
a cool head not easily turned. It would be unfair not 
to add that he had something much better, a really 
warm and affectionate regard for old friends, the best 
preservative against the fumes of flattery and sudden 
fame. Holroyd, Deyverdun, Madame Necker were more 
to him than all the great people with whom he now be- 
came acquainted. Necker and his wife came over from 
Paris and paid him a long visit in Bentinck Street, when 
his laurels were just fresh. " I live with her " he writes, 
" just as I used to do twenty years ago, laugh at her Paris 
varnish, and oblige her to become a simple reasonable 
Suissesse. The man, who might read English husbands 
lessons of proper and dutiful behaviour, is a sensible, 
good-natured creature." The next year he returned 
the visit to Paris. His fame had preceded him, and he 









88 GIBBON. [chap, 

received the cordial but discriminating welcome which 
the ancien regime at that time specially reserved for gens 
d' esprit. Madame du Deffand writes to Walpole, " Mr. 
Gibbon has the greatest success here ; it is quite a struggle 
to get him." He did not deny himself a rather sumptuous; 
style of living while in Paris. Perhaps the recollection 
of the unpleasant effect of his English clothes and the, 
long waists of the French on his former visit dwelt, 
in his mind, for now, like Walpole, he procured a new- ^ 
outfit at once. " After decking myself out with silks, 
and silver, the ordinary establishment of coach, lodgings,, 
servants, eating, and pocket expenses, does not exceed! 
60/. per month. Yet I have two footmen in handsome 
liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung 
with damask." 

The remainder of his life in London has nothing im- 
portant. He persevered assiduously with his history,, 
and had two more quartos ready in 1781. They were 
received with l:ss enthusiasm than the first, although 
they were really superior. Gibbon was rather too 
modestly inclined to agree with the public and " to 
believe that, especially in the beginning, they were more 
prolix and les? entertaining " than the previous volume. 
He also wasted some weeks on his vindication of the 
fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of that volume, which 
had excited a host of feeble and ill-mannered attacks. 
His defence was complete, and in excellent temper. But 
the piece has no permanent value. His assailants were 
so ignorant and silly that they gave no scope for a great 
controversial reply. Neither perhaps did the subject 
admit of it. A literary war generally makes people 
think of Bentley's incomparable Phalaris. But that 
was almost a unique occasion and victory in the history 






vi.] MEDITATES LEAVING LONDON. Sf 

of letters. Bentley himself, the most pugnacious of 
men, never found such another. 

And so the time glided by, till we come to the year 
1783. Lord North had resigned office, the Board of 
Trade was abolished, and Gibbon had lost his con- 
venient salary. The outlook was not pleasant. The 
seat on the Board of Customs or Excise with which his 
hopes had been for a time kept up, receded into a remote 
distance, and he came to the conclusion " that the reign 
of pensions and sinecures was at an end." It was 
clearly necessary to take some important step in the 
way of retrenchment. After he had lost his official inv 
come, his expenses exceeded his revenue by something; 
like four hundred pounds. A less expensive style ©£ 
living in London never seems to have presented itseM 
as an alternative. So, like many an Englishman before' 
and since, he resolved to go abroad to economise. 

His old friend Deyverdun was now settled in a com- 
fortable house at Lausanne, overlooking the Lake of 
Geneva. They had not met for eight years. But the 
friendship had begun a quarter of a century before, 
in the old days when Gibbon was a boarder in 
Pavillard's house, and the embers of old associations 
only wanted stirring to make them shoot up into flame. 
In a moment of expansion Gibbon wrote off a warm 
and eager letter to his friend, setting forth his unsatis- 
factory position, and his wish and even necessity to 
change it. He gradually and with much delicacy dis- 
closes his plan, that he and Deyverdun, both now old 
bachelors, should combine their solitary lives in a 
common household and carry out an old project, often 
discussed in younger days, of living together. " You 
live in a charming house. I see from here my apart- 



9u GIBBON. [chap. 

ment, the rooms we shall share with one another, our 
table, our walks. But such a marriage is worthless 
unless it suits both parties, and I easily feel that cir- 
cumstances, new tastes, and connections may frustrate 
a design which appeared charming in the distance. To 
settle my mind and to avoid regrets, you must be 
as frank as I have been, and give me a true picture, 
external and internal, of George Deyverdun." 

This letter, written in fluent and perfect French, is 
one of the best that we have of Gibbon. Deyverdun 
answered promptly, and met his friend's advances with 
at least equal warmth. The few letters that have been 
preserved of his connected with this subject give a 
highly favourable idea of his mind and character, and 
show he was quite worthy of the long and constant 
attachment that Gibbon felt for him. He cannot express 
the delight he has felt at his friend's proposal ; by the 
rarest piece of good fortune, it so happens that he him- 
self is in a somewhat similar position of uncertainty 
and difficulty; a year ago Gibbon's letter would have 
given him pleasure, now it offers assistance and support. 
After a few details concerning the tenant who occupies 
a portion of his house, he proceeds to urge Gibbon to 
carry out the project he had suggested, to break loose 
from parliament and politics, for which he was not fit, 
and to give himself up to the charms of study and 
friendship. " Call to mind, my dear friend," he goes on, 
"that I saw you enter parliament with regret, and I 
think I was only too good a prophet. I am sure that 
career has caused you more privations than joys, more 
pains than pleasures. Ever since I have known you I 
have been convinced that your happiness lay in your 
study and in society, and that any path which led you 



vi.J CORRESPONDENCE WITH DEYVERDUN. SI 

elsewhere was a departure from happiness." Through 
nine pages of gentle and friendly eloquence Deyverdun 
pursues his argument to induce his friend to clinch the 
bargain. " I advise you not only not to solicit a place, 
but to refuse one if it were offered to you. Would a 
thousand a year make up to you for the loss of five days 
a week 1 . . . . By making this retreat to Switzerland, 
besides the beauty of the country and the pleasures of 
its society, you will acquire two blessings which you 
have lost, liberty and competence. You will also be 
useful, your works will continue to enlighten us, and, 
independently of your talents, the man of honour and 
refinement is never useless." He then skilfully ex- 
hibits the attractions he has to offer. " Yqu used to 
like my house and garden ; what would you do now % 
On the first floor, which looks on the declivity of Ouchy, 
I have fitted up an apartment which is enough for me. 
I have a servant's room, two salons, two cabinets. On 
a level with the terrace two other salons, of which one 
serves as a dining-room in summer, and the other a 
drawing-room for company. I have arranged three 
more rooms between the house and the coachhouse, so 
that I can offer you all the large apartment, which con- 
sists actually of eleven rooms, great and small, looking 
east and south, not splendidly furnished, I allow, but 
with a certain elegance which I hope you will like. The 
terrace is but little altered . . . . it is lined from end 
to end with boxes of orange-trees. The vine-trellis has 
prospered, and extends nearly to the end. I have pur- 
chased the vineyard below the garden, and in front of 
the house made it into a lawn, which is watered by the 
water of the fountain .... In a word, strangers come 
to see the place, and in spite of my pompous description 
G 5 



92 GIBBON. [chap. 

of it I think you will like it .... If you come, 
you will find a tranquillity which you cannot have 
in London, and a friend who has not passed a single 
day without thinking of you, and who, in spite of his 
defects, his foibles, and his inferiority, is still one of 
the companions who suits you best." 

More letters followed from both sides in a similar 
strain. Yet Gibbon quailed before a final resolution. 
His aunt, Mrs Porten, his mother, Mrs. Gibbon, his 
friend, Lord Sheffield, all joined in deprecating his 
voluntary exile. " That is a nonsensical scheme," said 
the latter, " you have got into your head of returning to 
Lausanne — a pretty fancy ; you remember how much 
you liked it in your youth, but now you have seen more 
of the world, and if you were to try it again you would 
find yourself woefully disappointed," Deyverdun, with 
complete sympathy, begged him not to be in too great 
a hurry to decide on a course which he himself desired 
so much. "I agree with you," he wrote to Gibbon, 
" that this is a sort of marriage, but I could never forgive 
myself if I saw you dissatisfied in the sequel, and in a 
position to reproach me " Gibbon felt it was a case 
demanding decision of character, and he came to a 
determination with a promptitude and energy not usual 
with him. He promised Deyverdun in the next letter 
an ultimatum, stating whether he meant to go or to stay, 
and a week after he wrote, "I go." He had prudently 
refrained from consulting Lord Sheffield during this 
critical period, knowing that his certain disapprobation 
of the scheme would only complicate matters and 
render decision more difficult. Then he wrote, " I have 
given Deyverdun my word of honour to be at Lausanne 
at the beginning of October, and no power of persuasion 



vi.] DEPARTURE FOR LAUSANNE. 93 

can divert me from this irrevocable resolution, which 
I am every day proceeding to execute." 

This was no exaggeration. He cancelled the lease of 
his house in Bentinck Street, packed the more necessary 
portion of his books and shipped them for Rouen, and as 
his postchaise moved over Westminster Bridge, " bade a 
long farewell to the fumum et opes strepitumque JRomce." 
The only real pang he felt in leaving arose from the 
" silent grief " of his Aunt Porten, whom he did not hope 
to see again. Nor did he. He started on September 
15, 1783, slept at Dover, was nattered with the hope of 
making Calais harbour by the same tide in "three hours 
and a half, as the wind was brisk and fair," but was 
driven into Boulogne. He had not a symptom of sea- 
sickness. Then he went on by easy stages through 
Aire, Bethune, Douay, Cambray, St. Quentin, La Fere, 
Laon, Rheims, Chalons, St. Dizier, Langres, Besancon, 
and arrived at Lausanne on the 27th The inns he 
found more agieeable to the palate than to the sight or 
the smell At Langres he had an excellent bed about 
six feet high from the ground. He beguiled the time 
with Homer and Clarendon, talking with his servant, 
Caplin, and his dog Muff, and sometimes with the 
French postilions, and he found them the least rational 
of the animals mentioned. 

He reached his journey's end, to alight amid a num- 
ber of minor troubles, which to a less easy tempered 
man would have been real annoyances. He found that 
Deyverdun had reckoned without his host, or rather his 
tenant, and that they could not have possession of the 
house for several months, so he had to take lodgings. 
Then he sprained his ankle, and this brought on a bad 
attack of the gout, which laid him up completely, 






94 GIBBON. [chap. vi. 

However, his spirits never gave way. In time his 
books arrived, and the friends got installed in their own 
house. His satisfaction has then no bounds, with the 
people, the place, the way of living, and his daily 
companion. We must now leave him for a short space 
in the enjoyment of his happiness, while we briefly 
consider the labours of the previous ten years* 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE FIEST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND 

FALL. 

The historian who is also an artist is exposed to a par- 
ticular drawback from which his brethren in other fields 
are exempt. The mere lapse of time destroys the value 
and even the fidelity of his pictures. In other arts cor- 
rect colouring and outline remain correct, and if they 
are combined with imaginative power, age rather en- 
hances than diminishes their worth. But the historian 
lives under another law. His reproduction of a past 
age, however full and true it may appear to his con- 
temporaries, appears less and less true to his successors. 
The way in which he saw things ceases to be' satisfactory ; 
we may admit his accuracy, but we add a qualification 
referring to the time when he wrote, the point of view 
that he occupied. And we feel that what was accurate 
for him is no longer accurate for us. This superannua- 
tion of historical work is not similar to the superseding of 
scientific work which is ever going on, and is the capital 
test of progress. Scientific books become rapidly old- 
fashioned, because the science to which they refer 
is in constant growth, and a work on chemistry or 
biology is out of date by reason of incompleteness 



96 GIBBON. [chap. 

or the discovery of unsuspected errors. The scientific 
side of history, if we allow it to have a scientific side, 
conforms to this rule, and presents no singularity. 
Closer inspection of our materials, the employment 
of the comparative method, occasionally the bringing 
to light of new authorities — all contribute to an 
increase of real knowledge, and historical studies in 
this respect do not differ from other branches of re- 
search. But this is not the sole or the chief cause of 
the renovation and transformation constantly needed in 
historic work. That depends on the ever- moving stand- 
point from which the past is regarded, so that society in 
looking back on its previous history never sees it for 
long together at quite the same angle, never sees, we 
may say, quite the same thing. The past changes to us 
as we move down the stream of time, as a distant moun- 
tain changes through the windings of the road on which 
we travel away from it. To drop figure and use language 
now becoming familiar, the social organism is in constant 
growth, and receiving new additions, and each new addi- 
tion causes us to modify our view of the whole. The 
historian, in fact, is engaged in the study of an un- 
finished organism, whose development is constantly pre- 
senting him with surprises. It is as if the biologist 
were suddenly to come upon new and unheard-of species 
and families which would upset his old classification, or 
as if the chemist were to find his laws of combination 
replaced by others which were not only unknown to him, 
but which were really new and" recent in the world. 
Other inquirers have the whole of the phenomena with 
which their science is concerned before them, and they 
may explore them at their leisure. The sociologist has 
only an instalment, most likely a very small instalment, 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. S7 

of the phenomena with which his science is concerned 
before him. They have not yet happened, are not 
yet phenomena, and as they do happen and admit of 
investigation they necessarily lead to constant modifica- 
tion of his views and deductions. Not only does he 
acquire new knowledge like other inquirers, but he is 
constantly having the subject-matter from which he 
derives his knowledge augmented. Even in modern 
times society has thrown out with much sudden- 
ness rapid and unexpected developments, of such scope 
and volume that contemporaries have often lost self- 
possession at the sight of them, and wondered if social 
order could survive. The Reformation and the French 
Revolution are cases in point. And what a principal part 
do these two great events always play in any specu- 
lations instituted subsequent to them ! How easy it is 
to see whether a writer lived before the Reign of Terror, 
or after it, from his gait and manner of approaching 
social inquiries ! Is there any reason to suppose that 
such mutations are now at an end 1 None. The prob- 
ability, well nigh a certainty, is that metamorphoses of 
the social organism are in store for us which will equal, 
if they do not vastly exceed, anything that the past has 
offered. 

Considerations of this kind need to be kept in view 
if we would be just in our appreciation of historical 
writings which have already a certain age. It is im- 
possible that a history composed a century ago should 
fully satisfy us now ; but we must beware of blaming 
the writer for his supposed or real shortcomings, till we 
have ascertained how far they arose from his personal 
inadequacy to his task, and were not the result of his 



98 GIBBON. [cuxv. 

chronological position. It need not be said that this 
remark does not refer to many books which are called 
histories, but are really contemporary memoirs and 
original authorities subservient to history proper. The 
works of Clarendon and Burnet, for instance, can never 
lose a certain value on this account. The immortal 
book which all subsequent generations have agreed to 
call a possession for' ever, is the unapproachable ideal of 
this class. But neither Thucydides nor Clarendon were 
historians in the sense in which Gibbon was an historian, 
that is, engaged in the delineation of a remote epoch by 
the help of such materials as have escaped the ravages 
of time. It is historians like Gibbon who are exposed 
to the particular unhappiness referred to a little way 
back — that of growing out of date through no fault of 
their own, but through the changed aspect presented 
by the past in consequence of the movement which has 
brought us to the present. But if this is the field of his- 
torical disaster, it is also the opportunity of historical 
genius. In proportion as a writer transcends the special 
limitations of his time, will "age fail to wither him." 
That he cannot entirely shake off the fetters which 
fasten him to his epoch is manifest. But in propor- 
tion as his vision is clear, in proportion as he has 
with singleness of eye striven to draw the past with 
reverent loyalty, will his bondage to his own time be 
loosened, and his work will remain faithful work for 
which due gratitude will not be withheld. 

The sudden and rapid expansion of historic^ studies 
in the middle of the eighteenth century constitutes one 
of the great epochs in literature. Up to the year 1750 
no great historical work had appeared in any modern 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 99 

language. 1 The instances that seem to make against 
this remark will be found to confirm it. They consist 
of memoirs, contemporary documents, in short materials 
for history, but not history itself. From Froissart and 
De Comines, or even from the earlier monastic writers 
to St. Simon (who was just finishing his incomparable 
Memoirs), history with wide outlook and the conception 
of social progress and interconnection of events did not 
exist. Yet history in its simple forms is one of the 
most spontaneous of human achievements. Stories of 
mighty deeds, of the prowess and death of heroes, are 
among the earliest productions of even semi civilised 
man — the earliest subjects of epic and lyric verse. 
But this rudimentary form is never more than biogra- 
phical. With increasing complexity of social evolution 
' it dies away, and history proper, as distinct from annals 
and chronicle, does not arise till circumstances allow of 
general and synthetic views, till societies can be sur- 
veyed from a sufficient distance and elevation for their 
movements to be discerned. Thucydides, Livy, and 
Tacitus do not appear till Greece and Rome have reached 
their highest point of homogeneous national life. The 
tardy dawn of history in the modern world was owing 
to its immense complexity. Materials also were want- 
ing. They gradually emerged out of manuscript all over 
Europe, daring what may be called the great pedant 
age (1550-1650), under the direction of meritorious an- 
- tiquaries, Camden, Savile, Duchesne, Gale, and others. 
Still official documents and state papers were wanting, 
and had they been at hand would hardly have been 

1 Mezeray's great history of France is next to valueless till he 
reaches the sixteenth century, that was a period bordering on his 
own. Thuanus deals with contemporary events 

5* 



100 GIBBON. [chap. 

used with competence. The national and religious 
limitations were still too marked and hostile to permit 
a free survey over the historic field. The eighteenth 
century, though it opened with a bloody war, was essen- 
tially peaceful in spirit : governments made war, but 
men and nations longed for rest. The increased inter- 
est in the past was shown by the publication nearly 
contemporary of the great historic collections of Rymer 
(a.d. 1704), Leibnitz (1707), and Muratori (1723). 
Before the middle of the century the historic muse had 
abundant oil to feed her lamp. Still the lamp would 
probably not have been lighted but for the singular 
pass to which French thought had come. 

From the latter years of Louis XIV. till the third 
quarter of the eighteenth century was all but closed, 
France had a government at once so weak and wicked, 
so much below the culture of the people it oppressed, 
that the better minds of the nation turned away in dis- 
gust from their domestic ignominy, and sought consola- 
tion in contemplating foreign virtue wherever they 
thought it was to be found; in short, they became 
cosmopolitan. The country which has since been the 
birthplace of Chauvinism, put away national pride almost 
with passion. But this was not all. The country whose 
king was called the Eldest Son of the Church, and with 
which untold pains had been taken to keep it orthodox, 
had lapsed into such an abhorrence of the Church and 
of orthodoxy that anything seemed preferable to them 
in its eyes. 

Thus, as if by enchantment, the old barriers dis- 
appeared, both national and religious. Man and his 
fortunes, in all climes and all ages, became topics of 
intense interest, especially when they tended to degrade 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 101 

by contrast the detested condition of things at home. 
This was the weak side of historical speculation in 
France : it was essentially polemical ; prompted less by 
genuine interest in the past than by strong hatred of 
the present. Of this perturbation note must be taken. 
But it is none the less true that the disengagement of 
French thought from the narrow limits of nation and 
creed produced, as it were in a moment, a lofty concep- 
tion of history such as subsequent ages may equal, but 
can hardly surpass. 

i The influence of French thought was European, and 

nowhere more beneficial than in England. In other 
countries it was too despotic, and produced in Germany, 
at least, Lessing's memorable reaction. But the robust 

p£ national and political life of England reduced it to a 
welcome flavouring of our insular temperament. The 
Scotch, who had a traditional connection with France, 
were the first importers of the new views. Hume, who 
had practically grown in the same soil as Voltaire, was 
only three years behind him in the historic field. The 
Age of Louis XIV. was published in 1751, and the first 
volume of the History of England in 1754. Hume was 
no disciple of Voltaire; he simply wrote under the 
stimulus of the same order of ideas. Robertson, who 
shortly followed him, no doubt drew direct inspiration 
from Voltaire, and his weightiest achievement, the 
View of the State of Europe, prefixed to his History of 
Charles V., was largely influenced, if it was not abso- 
lutely suggested, by the Essay on Manners. But both 
Hume and Robertson surpassed their masters, if we 
allow, as seems right, that the French were their 
masters. The Scotch writers had no quarrel with their 
country or their age as the French had. One was a 



102 GIBBON. [chap. 

Tory, the other a Whig ; and Hume allowed himself to 
be unworthily affected by party bias in his historical 
judgment. But neither was tempted to turn history 
into a covert attack on the condition of things amid 
which they lived. Hence a calmness and dignity of 
tone and language, very different from the petulant 
brilliancy of Voltaire, who is never so happy as when 
he can make the past look mean and ridiculous, merely 
because it was the parent of the odious present. But, 
excellent as were the Scotch historians — Hume, in style 
nearly perfect ; Bobertson, admirable for gravity and 
shrewd sense — they yet left much to be desired. Hume 
had despatched his five quartos, containing the whole 
history of England from the Boman period to the 
Be volution, in nine years. Considering that the subject 
was new to him when he began, such rapidity made 
genuine research out of the question. Bobertson had 
the oddest way of consulting his friends as to what 
subject it would be advisable for him to treat, and was 
open to proposals from any quarter with exemplary 
impartiality ; this only showed how little the stern 
conditions of real historic inquiry were appreciated by 
him. In fact it is not doing them injustice to say that 
these eminent men were a sort of modern Livies, chiefly 
occupied with the rhetorical part of their work, and not 
over inclined to waste their time in ungrateful digging 
in the deep mines of historic lore. Obviously the place 
was open for a writer who should unite all the broad 
spirit of comprehensive survey, with the thorough and 
minute patience of a Benedictine ; whose subject, mel- 
lowed by long brooding, should have sought him rather 
than he it ; whose whole previous course of study had 
been an unconscious preparation for one great effort 



vi.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 103 

which was to fill his life. When Gibbon sat down to 
write his book, the man had been found who united 
these difficult conditions. 

The decline and fall of Rome is the greatest event in 
history. It occupied a larger portion of the earth's 
surface, it affected the lives and fortunes of a larger 
number of human beings, than any other revolution on 
record. For it was essentially one, though it took 
centuries to consummate, and though it had for its 
theatre the civilised world. Great evolutions and 
catastrophes happened before it, and have happened 
since, but nothing which can compare with it in volume 
and mere physical size. Isor was it less morally. The 
destruction of Rome was not only a destruction of an 
empire, it was the destruction of a phase of human 
thought, of a system of human beliefs, of morals, 
politics, civilisation, as all these had existed in the 
world for ages. The drama is so vast, the cataclysm so 
appalling, that even at this day we are hardly removed 
from it far enough to take it fully in. The mind is op- 
pressed, the imagination flags under the load imposed 
upon it. The capture and sack of a town one can 
fairly conceive : the massacre, outrage, the flaming roofs, 
the desolation. Even the devastation of a province 
can be approximately reproduced in thought. But 
what thought can embrace the devastation and destruc- 
tion of all the civilised portions of Europe, Africa, and 
Asia % Who can realise a Thirty Years War lasting 
five hundred years 1 a devastation of the Palatinate 
extending through fifteen generations? If we try to 
insert into the picture, as we undoubtedly should do, 
the founding of the new, which was going on beside this 
destruction of the old, the settling down of the barba- 



104 GIBBON. [chap. 

rian hosts in the conquered provinces, the expansion of 
the victorious Church, driving paganism from the towns 
to the country and at last extinguishing it entirely, the 
effort becomes more difficult than ever. The legend of 
the Seven Sleepers testifies to the need men felt, even 
bafore the tragedy had come to an end, to symbolize in 
a manageable form the tremendous changes they saw- 
going on around them. But the legend only refers to 
the changes in religion. The fall of Rome was much 
more than that. It was the death of the old pagan 
world and the birth of the new Christian world — the 
greatest transition in history. 

This, and no less than this, is Gibbon's subject. 

He has treated it in such a way as even now fills com- 
petent judges with something like astonishment. His 
accuracy, coupled with the extraordinary range of his 
matter, the variety of his topics, the complexity of his 
undertaking, the fulness and thoroughness of his know- 
ledge, never failing at any point over the vast field, the 
ease and mastery with which he lifts the enormous load, 
are appreciated in proportion to the information and 
abilities of his critic. One testimonial will suffice. 
Mr. Freeman says : " That Gibbon should ever be dis- 
placed seems impossible. That wonderful man mono- 
polised, so to speak, the historical genius and the 
historical learning of a whole generation, and left little, 
indeed, of either for his contemporaries. He remains 
the one historian of the eighteenth century whom 
modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to 
set aside. We may correct and improve from the stores 
which have been opened since Gibbon's time ; we may 
write again large parts of his story from other and often 
truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work 



vii.l THE DECLINE AND FALL. 105 

I 
of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 

1300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried 
* out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful 
f accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is 
i read, Gibbon must be read too." 

Gibbon's immense scheme did not unfold itself to him 
at once : he passed through at least two distinct stages 
in the conception of his work. The original idea had 
> been confined to the decline and fall of the city of 
, Rome. Before he began to write, this had been 
expanded to the fall of the empire of the West. 
The first volume, which we saw him publish in the 
last chapter, was only an instalment, limited to the 
aocession of Constantine, through a doubt as to how 
his labours would be received. The two following 
\ volumes, published in 1781, completed his primitive 
plan. Then he paused exactly a year before he resolved 
to carry on his work to its true end, the taking of 
Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The latter por- 
tion he achieved in three volumes more, which he gave 
to the world on his fifty-first birthday, in 1788. Thus 
the work naturally falls into two equal parts. It will 
^ be more convenient to disregard in our remarks the 
i interval of five years which separated the publication of 
the first volume from its two immediate companions. 
The first three volumes constitute a whole in themselves, 
which we will now consider. 

From the accession of Commodus, a.d. 180, to the 
u last of the Western Caesars, a.d. 476, three centuries 
% elapsed. The first date is a real point of departure, 
the commencement of a new stage of decay in the em- 
pire The second is a mere official record of the final 
disappearance of a series of phantom sovereigns, whose 



106 GIBBON. [chap. 

vanishing was hardly noticed. Between these limits the 
empire passed from the autumnal calm of the Antonine 
period, through the dreadful century of anarchy between 
Pertinax and Diocletian, through the relative peace 
brought about by Diocletian's reforms, the civil wars of 
the sons of Constantine, the disastrous defeat of Julian, 
the calamities of the Gothic war, the short respite under 
Theodosius, the growing anarchy and misery under his in- 
competent sons, the three sieges of Rome and its sack by 
the Goths, the awful appearance of Attila and his Huns, 
the final submergence of the Western Empire under the 
barbarians, and the universal ruin which marked the 
close of the fifth century. This was the temporal side 
of affairs. On the spiritual, we have the silent occult 
growth of the early Church, the conversion of Constan- 
tine, the tremendous conflict of hostile sects, the heresy 
of Arius, the final triumph of Athanasius, the spread 
of monasticism, the extinction of paganism. Antiquity 
has ended, the middle ages have begun. 

Over all this immense field Gibbon moves with a 
striking attitude of power, which arose from his con- 
sciousness of complete preparation. What there was 
to be known of his subject he felt sure that he knew. 
His method of treatment is very simple, one might say 
primitive, but it is very effective. He masters his mate- 
rials, and then condenses and clarifies them into a broad, 
well-filled narrative, which is always or nearly always 
perfectly lucid through his skill in grouping events and 
characters, and his fine boldness in neglecting chronologi- 
cal sequence for the sake of clearness and unity of action. 
It is doing the book injustice to consult it only as a work 
of reference, or even to read it in detached portions. 
It should be read through, if we would appreciate the 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 107 

art. with which the story is told. No part can he 
fairly judged without regard to the remainder. In fact, 
Gibbon was much more an artist than perhaps be 
suspected, and less of a philosophic thinker on history 
than he would have been willing to allow. His short- 
comings in this latter respect will be adverted to 
presently ; we are now considering his merits. And 
among these the very high one of lofty and vigorous 
narrative stands pre eminent. The campaigns of Julian, 
Belisarius, and Heraclius are painted with a dash and 
clearness which few civil historians have equalled. 
His descriptive power is also very great. The picture 
of Constantinople in the seventeenth chapter is, as the 
writer of these pages can testify, a wonderful achieve- 
ment, both for fidelity and brilliancy, coming from a 
man who had never seen the place. 

" If we survey Byzantium in the extent which it acquired 
with the august name of Constantinople, the figure of the 
imperial city may be represented under that of an unequal 
triangle. The obtuse point, which advances towards the east and 
the shores of Asia, meets and repels the waves of the Thracian 
Bosphorus. The northern side of the city is bounded by the 
harbour ; and the southern is washed by the Propontis, or Sea 
of Marmora. The basis of the triangle is opposed to the west, and 
terminates the continent of Europe. But the admirable form and 
division of the circumjacent land and water cannot, without a 
more ample explanation, be clearly or sufficiently understood. 

" The winding channel through which the waters of the Euxine 
flow with rapid and incessant course towards the Mediterranean 
received the appellation of Bosphorus, a name not less celebrated 
in the history than in the fables of antiquity. A crowd of 
temples and of votive altars, profusely scattered along its steep 
and woody banks, attested the unskilfulness, the terrors, and 
the devotion of the Grecian navigators, who, after the example 
of the Argonauts, explored the dangers of the inhospitab t- 
H 



108 GIBBON. [chap. 

Euxine. On these banks tradition long preserved the memory 
oi the palace of Phineus, infested by the obscene Harpies, and 
of the sylvan reign oi Amycus, who defied the son of Leda to 
the combat of the cestus. The straits of the Bosphorus are 
terminated by the Cyanean rocks, which, according to the 
description of the poets, had once floated on the surface of the 
waters, and were destined by the gods to protect the entrance 
of the Euxine against the eye of profane curiosity. From the 
Cyanean rocks to the point and harbour of Byzantium the 
winding length of the Bosphorus extends about sixteen miles, 
and its most ordinary breadth may be computed at about one 
mile and a half. The new castles of Europe and Asia are con- 
structed on either continent upon the foundations of two 
celebrated temples of Serapis and Jupiter Urius. The old 
castles, a work of the Greek emperors, command the narrowest 
part of the channel, in a place where the opposite banks advauce 
within five hundred yards of each other. These fortresses were 
destroyed and strengthened by Mahomet the Second when he 
meditated the siege of Constantinople ; but the Turkish con- 
queror was most probably ignorant that near two thousand 
years before his reign Darius had chosen the same situation to 
connect the two continents by a bridge of boats. At a small 
distance from the old castles we discover the little town of 
Chrysopolis or Scutari, which may almost be considered as the 
Asiatic suburb of Constantinople. The Bosphorus, as it begins 
to open into the Propontis, passes between Byzantium and 
Chalcedon. The latter of these two cities was built by the 
Greeks a few years before the former, and the blindness of its 
founders, who overlooked the superior advantages of the opposite 
coast, has been stigmatised by a proverbial expression of contempt, 
"The harbour of Constantinople, which may be considered as 
an arm of the Bosphorus, obtained ima very remote period, the 
denomination of the Golden Horn. The curve which it describes 
might be compared to the horn of a stag, or as it should seem 
with more propriety, to that of an ox. The epithet of golden 
was expressive of the riches which every wind wafted from the 
most distant countries into the secure and capacious port of 
Constantinople. The river Lycus, formed by the conflux of two 
little streams, pours into the harbour a perpetual supply of fresh 



vii.] DESCRIPTION OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 109 

water, which serves to cleanse the bottom and to invite the 
periodical shoals of fish to seek their retreat in that convenient 
recess. As the vicissitudes of the tides are scarcely felt in those 
seas, the constant depth of the harbour allows goods to be 
landed on the quays without the assistance of boats, and it has 
been observed that in many places the largest vessels may rest 
their prows against the houses while their sterns are floating in 
the water. From the mouth of the Lycus to that of the harbour, 
this arm of the Bosphorus is more than seven miles in length. 
The entrance is about five hundred yards broad, and a strong 
chain could be occasionally drawn across it, to guard the port 
and the city from the attack of an hostile navy. 

" Between the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, the shores of 
Europe and Asia receding on either side include the Sea of 
Marmora, which was known to the ancients by the denomination 
of the Propontis. The navigation from the issue of the 
Bosphorus to the entrance of the Hellespont is about one 
hundred and twenty miles. Those who steer their westward 
course through the middle of the Propontis may at once descry 
the highlands of Thrace and Bithynia and never lose sight of 
the lofty summit of Mount Olympus, covered with eternal snows. 
They leave on the left a deep gulf, at the bottom of which 
Nicomedia was seated, the imperial residence of Diocletian, and 
they pass the small islands of Cyzicus and Proconnesus before 
they cast anchor at Gallipoli, where the sea which separates 
Asia from Europe is again contracted to a narrow chaonel. 

" The geographers, who with the most skilful accuracy have 
surveyed the form and extent of the Hellespont, assign about 
sixty miles for the winding course and about three miles for 
the ordinary breadth of those celebrated straits. But the nar- 
rowest part of the channel is found to the northward of the old 
Turkish castles between the cities of Sestos and Abydos. It 
was here that the adventurous Leander braved the passage of 
the flood for the possession of his mistress. It was here, likewise, 
in a place where the distance between the opposite banks cannot 
exceed five hundred paces, that Xerxes imposed a stupendous 
bridge of boats for the purpose of transporting into Europe an 
hundred and seventy myriads of barbarians. A sea contracted 



110 GIBBON". [chap. 

within such narrow limits may seem but ill to deserve the 
singular epithet of broad, which Homer, as well as Orpheus, 
has frequently bestowed on the Hellespont. But our ideas of 
greatness are of a relative nature ; the traveller, and especially 
the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued the wind- 
ings of the stream and contemplated the rural scenery which 
appeared on every side to terminate the prospect, insensibly 
lost the remembrance of the sea, and his fancy painted those 
celebrated straits with all the attributes of a mighty river 
flowing with a swift current in the midst of a woody and inland 
country, and at length through a wide mouth discharging itself 
into the iEgean or Archipelago. Ancient Troy, seated on an 
eminence at the foot of Mount Ida, overlooked the mouth of 
the Hellespont, which scarcely received an accession of waters 
from the tribute of those immortal rivulets the Simois and 
Scamander. The Grecian camp had stretched twelve miles 
along the shore from the Sigsean to the Khsetian promontory, 
and the flanks of the army were guarded by the bravest chiefs 
who fought under the banners of Agamemnon. The first of 
these promontories was occupied by Achilles with his invincible 
Myrmidons, and the dauntless Ajax pitched his tents on the 
other. After Ajax had fallen a sacrifice to his disappointed 
pride and to the ingratitude of the Greeks, his sepulchre was 
erected on the ground where he had defended the navy against 
the rage of Jove and Hector, and the citizens of the rising 
town of Khsetiuni celebrated his memory with divine honours. 
Before Constantine gave a just preference to the situation of 
Byzantium he had conceived the design of erecting the seat of 
empire on this celebrated spot, from whence the Romans derived 
their fabulous origin. The extensive plain which lies below 
ancient Troy towards the Ehaetian promontory was first chosen 
for his new capital ; and though the undertaking was soon 
relinquished, the stately remains of unfinished walls and towers 
attracted the notice of all who sailed through the straits of the 
Hellespont. 

"We are at present qualified to view the advantageous 
position of Constantinople ; which appears to have been formed 
by nature for the centre and capital of a great monarchy. 



vil] DESCRIPTION OF CONSTANTINOPLE. Ill 

Situated in the forty-first degree of latitude, the imperial 
city commanded from her seven hills the opposite shores of 
Europe and Asia ; the climate was healthy and temperate ; the 
soil fertile ; the harbour secure and capacious ; and the approach 
on the side of the continent was of small extent and easy 
defence. The Bosphorus and the Hellespont may be con- 
sidered as the two gates of Constantinople, and the prince 
who possesses those important passages could always shut 
them against a naval enemy and open them to the fleets of 
commerce. The preservation of the eastern provinces may in 
some degree be ascribed to the policy of Constantine, as the 
barbarians of the Euxine, who in the preceding age had 
poured their armaments into the heart of the Mediterranean, 
soon desisted from the exercise of piracy, and despaired of 
forcing this insurmountable barrier. When the gates of the 
Hellespont and Bosphorus -were shut, the capital still enjoyed 
within their spacious inclosure every production which could 
supply the wants or gratify the luxury of its numerous in- 
habitants. The sea-coasts of Thrace and Bithynia, which 
languish under the weight of Turkish oppression, still exhibit 
a rich prospect of vineyards, of gardens, and of plentiful 
harvests ; and the Propontis has ever been renowned for an 
inexhaustible store of the most exquisite fish that are taken 
in their stated seasons without skill and almost without 
labour. But when the passages of the straits were thrown open 
for trade, they alternately admitted the natural and artificial 
riches of the north and south, of the Euxine and the Mediter- 
ranean. Whatever rude commodities were collected in the 
forests of Germany and Scythia, and as far as the sources of the 
Tanais and Borysthenes ; whatsoever was manufactured by the 
skill of Europe or Asia, the corn of Egypt, the gems and spices 
of the furthest India, were brought by the varying winds into 
the port of Constantinople, which for many ages attracted the 
commerce of the ancient world. 

" The prospect of beauty, of safety, and of wealth united in a 
single spot was sufficient to justify the choice of Constantine. 
But as some mixture of prodigy and fable has in every age been 
supposed to reflect a becoming majesty on the origin of great 



112 GIBBON. [chap. 

cities, the emperor was desirous of ascribing his resolution not 
so much to the uncertain counsels of human policy as to the 
eternal and infallible decrees of divine wisdom. In one of his 
laws he has been careful to instruct posterity that in obedience 
to the commands of God he laid the everlasting foundations of 
Constantinople, and though he has not condescended to relate 
in what manner the celestial inspiration was communicated to 
his mind, the defect of his modest silence has been liberally 
supplied by the ingenuity of succeeding writers, who describe 
the nocturnal vision which appeared to the fancy of Constantine 
as he slept within the walls of Byzantium. The tutelar genius 
of the city, a venerable matron sinking under the weight of 
years and infirmities, was suddenly transformed into a blooming 
maid, whom his own hands adorned with all the symbols of 
imperial greatness. The monarch awoke, interpreted the au- 
spicious omen, and obeyed without hesitation the will of Heaven. 
The day which gave birth to a city or a colony was celebrated 
by the Romans with such ceremonies as had been ordained by 
a generous superstition : and though Constantine might omit 
some rites which savoured too strongly of their pagan origin, 
yet he was anxious to leave a deep impression of hope and 
respect on the minds of the spectators. On foot, with a lance 
in his hand, the emperor himself led the solemn procession : 
and directed the line which was traced as the boundary of the 
destined capital : till the growing circumference was observed 
with astonishment by the assistants, who at length ventured to 
observe that he had already exceeded the most ample measure 
of a great city. ' I shall still advance,' replied Constantine, 'till 
HE, the invisible Guide who marches before me, thinks proper 
to stop.' " 

Gibbon proceeds to describe the extent, limits, and 
edifices of Constantinople. Unfortunately the limits of 
our space prevent us from giving more than a portion 
of his brilliant picture. 

" In the actual state of the city the palace and gardens of the 
Seraglio occupy the eastern promontory, the first of the seven hills, 



vii.] DESCRIPTION OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 113 

and cover about one hundred and fifty acres of our own measure. 
The seat of Turkish jealousy and despotism is erected on the 
foundations of a Grecian republic : but it may be supposed 
that the Byzantines were tempted by the conveniency of the 
harbour to extend their habitations on that side beyond the 
modern limits of the Seraglio. The new walls of Constantine 
stretched from the port to the Propontis across the enlarged 
breadth of the triangle, at the distance of fifteen stadia from 
the ancient fortifications : and with the city of Byzantium they 
inclosed five of the seven hills, which to the eyes of those who 
approach Constantinople appear to rise above each other in 
beautiful order. About a century after the death of the founder 
the new buildings, extending on one side up the harbour, and 
on the other the Propontis, already covered the narrow ridge of 
the sixth and the broad summit of the seventh hill. The 
necessity of protecting those suburbs from the incessant inroads 
of the barbarians engaged the younger Theodosius to surround 
his capital with an adequate and permanent inclosure of walls. 
From the eastern promontory to the Golden Gate, the extreme 
length of Constantinople was above three Roman miles ; the 
circumference measured between ten and eleven ; and the 
surface might be computed as equal to about two thousand 
English acres. It is impossible to justify the vain and credulous 
exaggerations of modern travellers, who have sometimes stretched 
the limits of Constantinople over the adjacent villages of the 
European and even Asiatic coasts. But the suburbs of Pera 
and Galata, though situate beyond the harbour, may deserve to 
be considered as apart of the city, and this addition may perhaps 
authorise the measure of a Byzantine historian, who assigns six- 
teen Greek (about sixteen Eoman) miles for the circumference of 
his native city. Such an extent may seem not unworthy of an 
imperial residence. Yet Constantinople must yield to Babylon 
and Thebes, to ancient Borne, to London, and even to Paris . . . 
" Some estimate may be formed of the expense bestowed with 
imperial liberality on Constantinople, by the allowance of about 
two millions five hundred thousand pounds for the construction 
of the walls, the porticoes, and the aqueducts. The forests that 
overshadowed the shores of the Euxine, and the celebrated 



114 GIBBON. [chap. 

quarries of white marble in ths little island of Proconnesus, 
supplied an inexhaustible stock of materials ready to be 
conveyed by the convenience of a short water carriage to the 
harbour of Byzantium. A multitude of labourers and artificers 
urged the conclusion of the work with incessant toil, but the 
impatience of Constantine soon discovered that in the decline of 
the arts the skill as well as the number of his architects bore a 
very unequal proportion to the greatness of his design. . . The 
buildings of the new city were executed by such artificers as 
the age of Constantine could afford, but they were decorated by 
the hands of the most celebrated masters of the age of Pericles 
and Alexander. ... By Constantine's command the cities of 
Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable orna- 
ments. The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of religious 
veneration, the most finished statues of the gods and heroes, of 
the sages and poets of ancient times, contributed to the splendid 
triumph of Constantinople. 

" • • • • The Circus, or Hippodrome, was a stately building of 
about four hundred paces in length and one hundred in breadth. 
The space between the two metre, or goals, was filled with statues 
and obelisks, and we may still remark a very singular fragment 
of antiquity — the bodies of three serpents twisted into one 
pillar of brass. Their triple heads had once supported the 
golden tripod which, after the defeat of Xerxes, was consecrated 
in the temple of Delphi by the victorious Greeks. The beauty 
of the Hippodrome has been long since defaced by the rude 
hands of the Turkish conquerors ; but, under the similar appel- 
lation of Atmeidan, it still serves as a place of exercise for their 
horses. From the throne whence the emperor viewed the 
Circensian games a winding staircase descended to the palace, 
a magnificent edifice, which scarcely yielded to the residence of 
Eome itself, and which, together with the dependent courts, 
gardens, and porticoes, covered a considerable extent of ground 
upon the banks of the Propontis between the Hippodrome and 
the church of St. Sophia. We might likewise celebrate the 
baths, which still retained the name of Zeuxippus, after they 
had been enriched by the magnificence of Constantine with lofty 
columns, various marbles, and above three score statues of bronze. 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 115 

But we should deviate from the design of this history if we 
attempted minutely to describe the different buildings or 
quarters of the city. ... A particular description, composed 
about a century after its foundation, enumerates a capitol or 
school of learning, a circus, two theatres, eight public and one 
hundred and fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticoes, five 
granaries, eight aqueducts or reservoirs of water, four spacious 
halls for the meeting of the senate or courts of justice, fourteen 
churches, fourteen palaces, and four thousand three hundred 
and eighty-eight houses, which for their size or beauty deserved 
to be distinguished from the multitude of plebeian habitations." 

Gibbon's conception of history was that of a spacious 
panorama, in which a series of tableaux pass in succes- 
sion before the reader's eye. He adverts but little, far 
too little, to that side of events which does not strike 
the visual sense. He rarely generalises or sums up a 
widely-scattered mass of facts into pregnant synthetic 
views. But possibly he owes some of the permanence of 
his fame to this very defect. As soon as ever a writer 
begins to support a thesis, to prove a point, he runs 
imminent danger of one-sidedness and partiality in his 
presentation of events. Gibbon's faithful transcript 
of the past has neither the merit nor the drawback of 
generalisation, and he has come in consequence to be 
regarded as a common mine of authentic facts to which 
all speculators can resort. 

The first volume, which was received with such warm 
acclamation, is inferior to those that followed. He 
seems to have be^n partly aware of this himself, and 
speaks of the "concise and superficial narrative from 
Commodus to Alexander." But the whole volume lacks 
the grasp and easy mastery which distinguish its 
successors, No doubt the subject-matter was com- 
paratively meagre and ungrateful. The century between 
6 



116 GIBBON". [chap. 

Commodus and Diocletian was one long spasm of 
anarchy and violence, which was, as Niebuhr said, 
incapable of historical treatment. The obscure con- 
fusion of the age is aggravated into almost complete 
darkness by the wretched materials which alone have 
survived, and the attempt to found a dignified narrative 
on such scanty and imperfect authorities was hardly 
wise. Gibbon would have shown a greater sense of 
historic proportion if he had passed over this period 
with a few bold strokes, and summed up with brevity 
such general results as may be fairly deduced. We may 
say of the first volume that it was tentative in every 
way. In it the author not only sounded his public, but 
he was also trying his instrument, running over the 
keys in preparatory search for the right note. He 
strikes it full and clear in the two final chapters on the 
Early Church ; these, whatever objections may be made 
against them on other grounds, are the real commence- 
ment of the Decline and Fall 

From this point onwards he marches with the steady 
and measured tramp of a Roman legion. His materials 
improve both in number and quality. The fourth 
century, though a period of frightful anarchy and 
disaster if compared to a settled epoch, is a period of 
relative peace and order when compared to the third 
century. The fifth was calamitous beyond example ; 
but ecclesiastical history comes to the support of 
secular history in a way which might have excited more 
gratitude in Gibbon than it did. From Constantine to 
Augustulus Gibbon is able to put forth all his strength. 
His style is less superfine, as his matter becomes more 
copious ; and the more definite cleavage of events 
brought about by the separation between the Eastern 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 117 

and Western Empires, enables him to display the higher 
qualities which marked him as an historian. 

The merit of his work, it is again necessary to point 
out, will not be justly estimated unless the considera- 
tions suggested at the beginning of this chapter be kept 
in view. We have to remember that his culture was 
chiefly French, and that his opinions were those which 
prevailed in France in the latter half of the eighteenth 
century He was the friend of Voltaire, Helvetius, and 
D'Holbach ; that is, of men who regarded the past as 
one long nightmare of crime, imposture, and folly, insti- 
gated by the selfish machinations of kings and priests. 
A strong infusion of the spirit which animated not 
only Voltaire's Essay on Manners, but certain parts of 
Hume's History of England might have been expected 
as a matter of course. It is essentially .absent. Gibbon's 
private opinions may have been what they will, but he 
has approved his high title to the character of an 
historian by keeping them well in abeyance. When he 
turned his eyes to the past and viewed it with intense 
gaze, he was absorbed in the spectacle, his peculiar 
prejudices were hushed, he thought only of the object 
before him and of reproducing it as well as he could. 
This is not the common opinion, but, nevertheless, a 
great deal can be said to support it. 

It will be as well to take two concrete tests — his 
treatment of two topics which of all others were most 
likely to betray him into deviations from historic candour. 
If he stands these, he may be admitted to stand any less 
severe. Let them be his account of Julian, and his 
method of dealing with Christianity. 

The snare that was spread by Julian's apostasy for the 
philosophers of the last century, and their haste to fall 



118 GIBBON. [chap. 

into it, are well known. The spectacle of a philosopher 
on the throne who proclaimed toleration, and contempt for 
Christianity, was too tempting and too useful controver- 
sially to allow of much circumspection in handling it. % 
The odious comparisons it offered were so exactly what 
was wanted for depreciating the Most Christian king and 
his courtly Church, that all further inquiry into the 
apostates merits seemed useless. Voltaire finds that 
Julian had all the qualities of Trajan without his defects ; 
all the virtues of Cato without his ill humour ; all that 
one admires in Julius Ccesar without his vices ; he had 
the continency of Scipio, and was in all ways equal to 
Marcus Aurelius, the first of men. Nay, more. If he 
had only lived longer, he would have retarded the fall 
of the Roman Empire, if he could not arrest it entirely. 
We here see the length to which "polemical fury" j 
could hurry a man of rare insight. Julian had been a 
subject of contention for years between the hostile 
factions. While one party made it a point of honour to 
prove that he was a monster, warring consciously against 
the Most High, the other was equally determined to 
prove that he was a paragon of all virtue, by reason of 
his enmity to the Christian religion. The deep interest 
attaching to the pagan reaction in the fourth century, 
and the social and moral problems it suggests, were per- 1 
ceived by neither side, and it is not difficult to see why - 
they were not. The very word reaction, in its modern 
sense, will hardly be found in the eighteenth century, 
and the thing that it expresses was very imperfectly 
conceived. We, who. have been surrounded by reactions, J 
real or supposed, in politics, in religion, in philosophy, 
recognise an old acquaintance in the efforts of the limited, 
intense Julian to stem the tide of progress as repre- 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 119 

sented in the Christian Church. It is a fine instance of 
the way in which the ever-unfolding present is con- 
stantly lighting up the past. Julian and his party were 
the Ultramontanes of their day in matters of religion, 
and the Romantics in matters of literature. Those 
radical innovators and reformers, the Christians, weie 
marching from conquest to conquest, over the old faith, 
making no concealment of their revolutionary aims and 
intentions to wipe out the past as speedily as possible. 
The conservatives of those times, after long despising 
the reformers, passed easily to fearing them and hating 
them as their success became threatening. " The attach- 
ment to paganism," says Meander, " lingered especially 
in many of the ancient and noble families of Greece and 
Rome." Old families, or new rich ones who wished to 
be thought old, would be sure to take up the cause of 
ancestral wisdom as against modern innovation. Before 
Julian came to the throne, a pagan reaction was immi- 
nent, as Neander points out. Julian himself was a 
remarkable man, as men of his class usually are. In the 
breaking up of old modes of belief, as Mill has said, 
" the most strong-minded and discerning, next to those 
who head the movement, are generally those who bring 
up the rear." The energy of his mind and character 
was quite exceptional, and if we reflect that he only 
reigned sixteen months, and died in his thirty- second 
year, we must admit that the mark he has left in histor}' 
is very surprising. He and his policy are now discussed 
with entire calm by inquirers of all schools, and sincere 
Christians like Neander and Dean Milman are as little 
disposed to attack him with acrimony, as those of a 
different way of thought are inclined to make him a 
subject of unlimited panegyric. 






120 GIBBON. [chap. 

Through this difficult subject Gibbon has found his 
way with a prudence and true insight which extorted 
admiration, even in his own day. His account of 
Julian is essentially a modern account. The influence 
of his private opinions can hardly be traced in the 
brilliant chapters that he has devoted to the Apostate. 
He sees through Julian's weaknesses in a way in 
which Voltaire never saw or cared to see. His pitiful 
superstition, his huge vanity, his weak affectation are 
brought out with an incisive clearness and subtle pene- 
tration into character which Gibbon was not always so 
ready to display. At the same time he does full justice 
to Julian's real merits. And this is perhaps the most 
striking evidence of his penetration. An error on 
the side of injustice to Julian is very natural in a man 
who, having renounced allegiance to Christianity, yet 
fully realises the futility of attempting to arrest it in 
the fourth century. A certain intellectual disdain for 
the reactionary emperor is difficult to avoid. Gibbon 
surmounts it completely, and he does so, not in conse- 
quence of a general conception of the reactionary spirit, 
as a constantly emerging element in society, but by sheer 
historical insight, clear vision of the fact before him. It 
may be added that nowhere is Gibbon's command of 
vivid narrative seen to greater advantage than in the 
chapters that he has devoted to Julian. The daring 
march from Gaul to Illyricum is told with immense 
spirit ; but the account of Julian's final campaign and 
death in Persia is still better, and can hardly be sur- 
passed. It has every merit of clearness and rapidity, 
yet is full of dignity, which culminates in this fine 
passage referring to the night before the emperor 
received his mortal wound. 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 121 

" While Julian struggled with the almost insuperable 
difficulties of his situation, the silent hours of the night 
were still devoted to study and contemplation. "When 
ever he closed his eyes in short and interrupted slumbers, 
his mind was agitated by painful anxiety; nor can it be 
thought surprising that the Genius of the empire should 
once more appear before him, covering with a funereal 
veil his head and his horn of abundance, and slowly 
retiring from the Imperial tent. The monarch started 
from his couch, and, stepping forth to refresh his wearied 
spirits with the coolness of the midnight air, he beheld 
a fiery meteor, which shot athwart the sky and suddenly 
vanished. Julian was convinced that he had seen the 
menacing countenance of the god of war : the council 
which he summoned, of Tuscan Haruspices, unanimously 
pronounced that he should abstain from action ; but on 
this occasion necessity and reason were more prevalent 
than superstition, and the trumpets sounded at the 
break of day. " 1 . 

It will not be so easy to absolve Gibbon from the 

1 It is interesting to compare Gibbon's admirable picture with 
the harsh original Latin of his authority, Ammianus Marcellinus. 
" Ipse autem ad sollicitam suspensamque quietem paullisper pro- 
tractus, cum somno (ut solebat) depulso, ad asmulationem Csesaris 
Julii qusedam sub pellibus scribens, obscuro noctis altitudine sensus 
(ujnsdam philosophi teneretur, vidit squalidius, ut confessus est 
jTOximis, speciem illam Genii publici, quam quum ad Augustum sur- 
geret culmen, conspexit in Galliis, velata cum capite cornucopia per 
aulsea tristius discedentem. Et quam quam ad momentum haesit, 
stupore defixus, omni tamen superior metu, ventura decretis cseles- 
tibus commendabat ; relicto numi strato cubili, adulta jam excitus 
nocte, et numinibus per sacra depulsoria supplicans, flagrantissimam 
facem cadenti similem visam, aeris parte sidcata evanuisse existi- 
mavit : horroreque perfusus est, ne ita aperte minax Martis ad- 
paruerit sidus." — Amm. Marc. lib. xxv. cap. 2. 



122 GIBBON. [chap. 

charge of prejudice in reference to his treatment of the 
Early Church. It cannot be denied that in the two 
famous chapters, at least, which concluded his first 
volume, he adopted a tone which must be pronounced 
offensive, not only from the Christian point of view, but 
on the broad ground of historical equity. His precon- 
ceived opinions were too strong for him on this occasion, 
and obstructed his generally clear vision. Yet a distinc- 
tion must be made. The offensive tone in question is 
confined to these two chapters. "We need not think that 
it was in consequence of the clamour they raised that 
he adopted a different style with referenca to church 
matters in his subsequent volumes. A more credit- 
able explanation of his different tone, which will be 
presently suggested, is at least as probable. In any 
case, these two chapters remain the chief slur on his 
historical impartiality, and it is worth while to examine 
what his offence amounts to. 

Gibbon's account of the early Christians is vitiated by 
his narrow and distorted conception of the emotional 
side of man's nature. Having no spiritual aspirations 
himself, he could not appreciate or understand them in 
others. Those emotions which have for their object the 
unseen world and its centre, God, had no meaning for 
him ; and he was tempted to explain them away when 
he came across them, or to ascribe their origin and 
effects to other instincts which were more intelligible 
to him. The wonderland which the mystic inhabits was 
closed to him, he remained outside of it and reproduced 
in sarcastic travesty the reports he heard of its marvels. 
What he has called the secondary causes of the growth 
of Christianity, were much rather its effects. The first 
is " the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians " 



vii.J THE DECLINE AND FALL. 123 

and their abhorrence of idolatry. With great power of 
language, he paints the early Christian " encompassed 
with infernal snares in every convivial entertainment, 
as often as his friends, invoking the hospitable deities, 
poured out libations to each other's happiness. When 
the bride, struggling with well -affected reluctance, was 
forced in hymenseal pomp over the threshold of her new 
habitation, or when the sad procession of the dead slowly 
moved towards the funeial pile, the Chiistian on these 
interesting occasions was compelled to desert the persons 
who were dearest to him, rather than contract the guilt 
inherent in those impious ceremonies." It is strange 
that Gibbon did not ask himself what was the cause of 
this inflexible zeal. The zeal produced the effects alleged, 
but what produced the zeal 1 He says that it was derived 
from the Jewish religion, but neglects to point out what 
could have induced Gentiles of every diversity of origin 
to derive from a despised race tenets and sentiments 
which would make their lives one long scene of self- 
denial and danger. The whole vein of remark is so 
completely out of date, that it is not worth dwelling on, 
except very summarily. 

The second cause is " the doctrine of a future life, 
( improved by every additional circumstance which could 
I give weight and efficacy to that important truth." Again 
we have an effect treated as a cause. "The ancient 
Christians were animated by a contempt for then- 
present existence, and by a just confidence of immor 
tality." Very true ; but the fact of their being s > 
> animated was what wanted explaining. Gibbon says it 
" was no wonder that so advantageous an offer " as that 
of immortality was accepted. Yet he had just before tuid 
us that the ablest orators at the bar and in the senate 
I 6* 



124 GIBBON. [chap. 

of Rome, conld expose this offer of immortality to ridicule 
without fear of giving offence. Whence arose, then, 
the sudden blaze of conviction with which the Christians 
embraced it 1 

The third cause is the miraculous powers ascribed to 
the primitive Church. Gibbon apparently had not the 
courage to admit tha^ he agreed with his friend Hume in 
rejecting miracles altogether. He conceals his drift in a 
cloud of words, suggesting indirectly with innuendo and 
sneer his real opinion. But this does not account for 
the stress he lays on the ascription of miracles. He seems 
to think that the claim of supernatural gifts somehow 
had the same efficacy as the gifts themselves would have 
had, if they had existed. 

The r ourth cause is the virtues of the primitive Chris- 
tians. The paragraphs upon it, Dean Milman considers 
the most uncandid in all the history, and they certainly 
do Gibbon 'no credit. AVith a strange ignorance of the 
human heart, he attributes the austere morals of the 
early Christians to their care for their reputation The 
ascetic temper, one of the most widely mani Tested in 
history, was beyond his comprehension. 

The fifth cause was the union and discipline of the 
Christian republic. For the last time the effect figures as 
the caus •. Union and discipline we know are powerful, 
but we know also that they ara the result of deep ante- 
cedent forces, and that prudence and policy alone never 
produced them 

It can surprise no one that Gibbon has treated the 
early Church in a way which is highly unsatisfactory if 
judged by a modern standard. Not only is it a period 
which criticism has gone over again and again with a 
microscope, but the standpoint from which such periods 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 125 

are observed has materially changed since his day. That 
dim epoch of nascent faith, full of tender and subdued 
tints, with a high light on the brows of the Crucified, was 
not one in which he could see clearly, or properly see at 
all. He has as little insight into the religious condition 
of the pagan world, as of the Christian It is singular 
how he passes over facts which were plain before him, 
which he knew quite well, as he knew nearly everything 
connected with his subject, but the real significance of 
which he missed. Thus he attributes to the scepticism 
of the pagan world the easy introduction of Christianity. 
Misled by the " eloquence of Cicero and the wit of 
Lucian," he supposes the second century to have been 
vacant of beliefs, in which a " fashion of incredulity "was 
widely diffused, and "many were almost disengaged fiom 
artificial prejudices." He was evidently unaware of the 
striking religious revival which uplifted paganism in 
the age of Hadrian, and grew with the sinking empire : 
the first stirrings of it may even be discerned in 
Tacitus, and go on increasing till we reach the theurgy of 
the ISTeoplatonists. A growing fear of the gods, a weari- 
ness of life and longing for death, a disposition to look 
for compensation for the miseries of this world to a 
brighter one beyond the grave — these traits are common 
in the literature of the second century, and show the 
change which had come over the minds of men. Gibbon 
is colour blind to these shades of the religious spirit : 
he can only see the banter of Lucian. 1 In reference 

1 On the religious revival of the second century, see Hausrath's 
Neutestamcnttiche Zeitgeschichte, vol. iii., especially the sections, 
"Hadrian's Mysticismus" and "Religiose Tendenzen in Kunst 
und Literatur," where this interesting subject is handled with a 
freshness and insight quite remarkable. 



126 GIBBON. [chap. 

to these matters he was a true son of his age, and could 
hardly be expected to transcend it. 

He cannot be cleared of this reproach. On the other 
hand, we must remember that Gibbon's hard and accurate 
criticism set a good example in one respect. The fertile 
fancy of the middle ages had run into wild exaggerations 
of the number of the primitive martyrs, and their legends 
had not always been submitted to impartial scrutiny even 
in the eighteenth century. We may admit that Gibbon 
was not without bias of another kind, and that his tone 
is often very offensive when he seeks to depreciate the 
evidence of the sufferings of the early confessors. His 
computation, which will allow of "an annual consumption 
of a hundred and fifty martyrs," is nothing short of 
cynical. Still he did good service in insisting on chapter 
and verse and fair historical proof of these frightful 
stories, before they were admitted. Dean Milman ac- 
knowledges so much, and defends him against the hot 
zeal of M. Guizot, justly adding that " truth must 
not be sacrificed even to well grounded moral indig- 
nation," in which sentiment all now will no doubt be 
willing to concur. 

The difference between the Church in the Catacombs, 
and the Church in the Palaces at Constantinople or 
Ravenna, measures the difference between Gibbon's 
treatment of early Christian history and his treatment 
of ecclesiastical history. Just as the simple-hearted 
emotions of God-fearing men were a puzzle and an irri- 
tation to him, so he was completely at home in exposing 
the intrigues of courtly bishops and in the metaphysics 
of theological controversy. His mode of dealing with 
Church matters from this point onward is hardly ever 
unfair, and has given rise to few protestations. He 



vil] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 127 

has not succeeded in pleasing everybody. What Church 
historian ever does 1 But he is candid, impartial, and 
discerning. His account of the conversion of Constan- 
tino is remarkably just, aud he is more generous to the 
first Christian Emperor than Niebuhr or Neander. He 
plunges into the Arian controversy with manifest delight, 
and has given in a few pages one of the clearest and 
most memorable resumes of that great struggle. But 
it is when he comes to the hero of that struggle, to an 
historic character who can be seen with clearness, that 
he shows his wonted tact and insight. A great man 
hardly ever fails to awaken Gibbon into admiration and 
sympathy. The " Great Athanasius," as he often calls 
him, caught his eye at once, and the impulse to draw a 
fine character, promptly silenced any prejudices which 
might interfere with faithful portraiture. " Athanasius 
stands out more grandly in Gibbon, than in the pages of 
the orthodox ecclesiastical historians " — Dr. Newman has 
said, — a judge whose competence will not be questioned. 
And as if to show how much insight depends on sympathy, 
Gibbon is immediately more just and open to the merits 
of the Christian community, than he had been hitherto. 
He now sees " that the privileges of the Church had 

f already revived a sense of order and freedom in the 
Koman government." His chapter on the rise of monas 
ticism is more fair and discriminating than the average 
Protestant treatment of that subject. He distinctly 
acknowledges the debt we owe the monks for their 
attention to agriculture, the useful trades, and the pre- 

| servation of ancient literature. The more disgusting 
forms of asceticism he touches with light irony, which 
is quite as effective as the vehement denunciations of 
non-Catholic writers. It must not be forgotten that 



128 GlBBOtf. - [chap. 

his ecclesiastical history derives a great superiority of 
clearness and proportion by its interweaving with the 
general history of the times, and this fact of itself 
suffices to give Gibbon's picture a permanent value even 
beside the master works of German erudition which 
have been devoted exclusively to Church matters. If 
we lay down Gibbon and take up Neander, for instance, 
we are conscious that with all the greater fulness of 
detail, engaging candour, and sympathetic insight of 
the great Berlin Professor, the general impression of 
the times is less distinct and lasting. There is no 
specialism in Gibbon ; his book is a broad sociological 
picture in which the whole age is portrayed. 

To sum up. In two memorable chapters Gibbon has 
allowed his prejudices to mar his work as an historian. 
But two chapters out of seventy-one constitute a small 
proportion. In the remainder of his work he is as 
free from bias and unfairness as human frailty can 
well allow. The annotated editions of Milman and 
Guizot are guarantees of this. Their critical animad- 
versions become very few and far between after the 
first volume is passed. If he had been animated by a 
polemical object in writing ; if he had used the past as 
an arsenal from which to draw weapons to attack the 
present, we may depend that a swift blight would have 
shrivelled his labours, as it did so many famous works 
of the eighteenth century, when the great day of reaction 
set in. His mild rebuke of the Abbe Raynal should not 
be forgotten. He admired the History of the Indies. It is 
one of the few books that he has honoured with mention 
and praise in the text of his own work. But he points 
out that the " zeal of the philosophic historian for the 
rights of mankind" had led him into a blunder. It 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 129 

was not only Gibbon's scholarly accuracy which saved 
him from such blunders. Perhaps he had less zeal for 
the rights of mankind than men like Baynal, whose 
general views he shared. But it is certain that he did 
not write with their settled parti pris of making his- 
tory a vehicle of controversy. His object was to be 
a faithful historian, and due regard being had to his 
limitations, he attained to it. 

If we now consider the defects of the Decline and 
Fall — which the progress of historic study, and still 
more the lapse of time, have gradually rendered visible, 
they will be found, as was to be expected, to consist 
in the author's limited conception of society, and of 
the multitudinous forces which mould and modify it. 
We are constantly reminded by the tone of remark that 
he sees chiefly the surface of events, and that the 
deeper causes which produce them have not been seen 
with the same clearness. In proportion as an age is 
remote, and therefore different from that in which a 
historian writes, does it behove him to remember that 
the social and general side of history is more important 
than the individual and particular. In reference to a 
period adjacent to our own the fortunes of individuals 
properly take a prominent place, the social conditions 
amid which they worked are familiar to us, and we 
understand them and their position without effort. 
But with regard to a remote age the case is different. 
Here our difficulty is to understand the social conditions, 
so unlike those with which we are acquainted, and as 
society is greater than man, so we feel that society, 
and not individual men, should occupy the chief place in 
the picture. Not that individuals are to be suppressed 
or neglected, but their subordination to the large 



130 GIBBON". [chap. 

historic background must be well maintained. The social, 
religious, and philosophic conditions amid which they 
played their parts should dominate the scene, and dwarf 
by their grandeur and importance the human actors 
who move across it. The higher historical style now 
demands what may be called compound narrative, that 
is narrative having reference to two sets of phenomena 
— one the obvious surface events, the other the larger 
and wider, but less obvious, sociological condition. A 
better example could hardly be given than Grote's 
account of the mutilation of the Hermse. The fact 
of the mutilation is told in the briefest way in a few 
lines, but the social condition which overarched it, 
and made the disfiguring of a number of half-statues 
" one of the most extraordinary events in Greek history," 
demands five pages of reflections and commentary to 
bring out its full significance. Grote insists on the 
duty " to take reasonable pains to realise in our minds 
the religious and political associations of the Athenians," 
and helps us to do it by a train of argument and illus- 
tration. The larger part of the strength of the modern 
historical school lies in this method, and in able hands 
it has produced great results. 

It would be unfair to compare Gibbon to these 
writers. They had a training in social studies which 
he had not. But it is not certain that he has always 
acquitted himself well, even if compared to his contem- 
poraries and predecessors, Montesquieu, Mably, and 
Voltaire. In any case his narrative is generally want- 
ing in historic perspective and suggestive background. 
It adheres closely to the obvious surface of events with 
little attempt to place behind them the deeper sky of 
social evolution, In many of his crowded chapters one 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 131 

cannot see the wood for the trees. The story is not 
lifted up and made lucid by general points of view, but 
drags or hurries along in the hollow of events, over 
which the author never seems to raise himself into 
a position of commanding survey. The thirty-sixth 
chapter is a marked instance of this defect. But the 
defect is general. The vigorous and skilful narrative, 
and a certain grandeur and weightiness of language, 
make us overlook it. It is only when we try to 
attain clear and succinct views, which condense into 
portable propositions the enormous mass of facts col- 
lected before us, that we feel that the writer has not 
often surveyed his subject from a height and distance 
sufficient to allow the great features of the epoch to be 
seen in bold outline. By the side of the history of 
concrete events, we miss the presentation of those 
others which are none the less events for be'ng vague, 
irregular, and wide-reaching, and requiring centuries for 
their accomplishment. Gibbon's manner of dealing with 
the first is always good, and sometimes consummate, 
and equal to anything in historical literature. The 
thirty- first chapter, with its description of Rome, soon 
to fall a prey to the Goths and Alaric, is a masterpiece, 
artistic and spacious in the highest degree ; though it is 
unnecessary to cite particular instances, as nearly every 
chapter contains passages of admirable historic power. 
But the noble flood of narrative never stops in medi- 
tative pause to review the situation, and point out 
with pregnant brevity what is happening in the sum 
total, abstraction made of all confusing details. Besides 
the facts of the time, we seek to have the tendencies of the 
age brought before us in their flow and expansion, the 
filiation of events over long periods deduced in clear 



132 GIBBON". [chap. 

sequence, a synoptical view which is to the mind what a 
picture is to the eye. In this respect Gibbon's method 
leaves not a little to be desired. 

Take for instance two of the most important aspects of 
the subject that he treated : the barbarian invasions, and 
the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. 
To the concrete side of both he has done ample justice. 
The rational and abstract side of neither has received 
~:he attention from him which it deserved. On the 
interesting question of the introduction of the bar- 
barians into the frontier provinces, and their incor- 
poration into the legions, he never seems to have quite 
made up his mind. In the twelfth chapter he calls it 
a "great and beneficial plan." Subsequently he calls it 
a disgraceful and fatal expedient. He recurs frequently 
to the subject in isolated passages, but never collects 
the facts, into a focus, with a view of deducing their real 
meaning. Yet the point is second to none in import- 
ance. Its elucidation throws more light on the fall of 
Home than any other considerations whatever. The 
question is, Whether Rome was conquered by the bar- 
barians in the ordinary sense of the word, conquered. 
We know that it was not, and Gibbon knew that it was 
not. Yet perhaps most people rise from reading his 
book with an impression that the empire succumbed to 
the invasion of the barbarians, as Carthage, Gaul, and 
Greece had succumbed to the invasion of the Romans ; 
that the struggle lay between classic Rome and outside 
uncivilised foes ; and that after two centuries of hard 
fighting the latter were victorious. The fact that the 
struggle lay between barbarians, who were, within 
and friendly to the empire, and barbarians who were 
without it, and hostile rather to their more fortunate 



vii.] THE DECLINE AND FALL. 133 

brethren, than to the empire which employed them, is 
implicitly involved in Gibbon's narrative, but it is not 
explicitly brought out. Romanised Goths, Vandals, and 
Franks were the defenders, nearly the only defenders, 
of the empire against other tribes and nations who 
were not Romanised, and nothing can be more plain 
than that Gibbon saw this as well as any one since, 
but he has not set it fort'i with prominence and 
clearness. With his complete mastery of the subject 
he would have done it admirably, if he had assumed 
the necessary point of view. 

Similarly, with regard to the causes of the fall of the 
empire. It is quite evident that he was not at all 
unconscious of the deep economic and social vices which 
undermined the great fabric. Depopulation, decay of 
agriculture, fiscal oppression, the general prostration 
begotten of despotism — all these sources of the great 
collapse may be traced in his text, or his wonderful notes, 
hinted very often with a flashing insight which antici- 
pates the most recent inquiries into the subject. But 
these considerations are not brought together to a 
luminous point, nor made to yield clear and tangible 
results. They lie scattered, isolated, and barren over 
three volumes, and are easily overlooked. One may say 
that generalised and synthetic views are conspicuous by 
their absence in Gibbon. 

But what of that ] These reflections, even if they be 
well founded, hardly dim the majesty of the Decline 
and Fall. The book is such a marvel of knowledge at 
once wide and minute, that even now, after numbers cf 
labourers have gone over the same ground, with onl; 
special objects in view, small segments of the gre;n 
circle which Gibbon fills alone, his word is still one n 



134 GIBBON. [chap. vii. 

the weightiest that can be quoted. Modem research 
has unquestionably opened out points of view to which 
he did not attain. But when it comes to close invests 
gation of any particular question, we rarely fail to find 
that he has seen it, dropped some pregnant hint about 
it, more valuable than the dissertations of other men. 
As Mr. Freeman says, " Whatever else is read, Gibbon 
must be read too." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE LAST TEN YEAES OF HIS LIFE IN LAUSANNE. 

After the preliminary troubles which met him on his 
arrival at Lausanne, Gibbon had four years of unbroken 
calm and steady work, of which there is nothing to 
record beyond the fact that they were filled with peace- 
ful industry. " One day," he wrote, " glides by another 
in tranquil uniformity. " During the whole period he 
never stirred ten miles out of Lausanne. He had nearly 
completed the fourth volume before he left England. 
Then came an interruption of a year — consumed in the 
break-up of his London establishment, his journey, the 
transport of his library, the delay in getting settled at 
Lausanne Then he sat down in grim earnest to finish 
his task, and certainly the speed he used, considering 
the quality of the work, left nothing to be desired. He 
achieved the fifth volume in twenty-one months, and the 
sixth in little more than a year. He had hoped to 
finish sooner, but it is no wonder that he found his 
work grow under his hands when he passed from design 
to execution. i( A long while ago, when I contemplated 
the distant prospect of my work," he writes to Lord 
Sheffield, " I gave you and myself some hopes of landing 



136 GIBBON. [chap. 

in England last autumn ; but alas ! when autumn grew 
near, hills began to rise on hills, Alps on Alps, and I 
found my journey far more tedious and toilsome than I 
had imagined. "When I look back on the length of the 
undertaking and the variety of materials, I cannot 
accuse or suffer myself to be accused of idleness ; yet it 
appeared that unless I doubled my diligence, another 
year, and perhaps more, would elapse before I could 
embark with my complete manuscript. Under these 
circumstances T took, and am still executing, a bold and 
meritorious resolution. The mornings in winter, and in 
a country of early dinners, are very concise. To them, 
my usual period of study, I now frequently add the 
evenings, renounce cards and society, refuse the most 
agreeable evenings, or perhaps make my appearance at 
a late supper. By this extraordinary industry, which I 
never practised, before, and to which I hope never to 
be again reduced, I see the last part of my history 
growing apace under my hands." He was indeed, as he 
said, now straining for the goal which was at last 
reached ' : on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of 
June, 1787. Between the hours of eleven and twelve 
I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer- 
house in my garden After laying down my pen, I took 
several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias^ 
which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and 
the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was 
serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the 
waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble 
the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, 
and perhaps the establishment of my fame But my 
pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was 
spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an 



viii.] THE LAST YEARS IN LAUSANNE. 137 

everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and 
that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, 
the life of the historian must be short and precarious." 

A faint streak of poetry occasionally shoots across 
Gibbon's prose. But both prose and poetry had now to 
yield to stern business. The printing of three quarto 
volumes in those days of handpresses was a formidable 
undertaking, and unless expedition were used the 
publishing season of the ensuing year would be lost. 
A month had barely elapsed before Gibbon with his 
precious cargo started for England. He went straight 
to his printers. The printing of the fourth volume 
occupied three months, and both author and publisher 
were warned that their common interest required a 
quicker pace. Then Mr. Strahan " fulfilled his engage- 
ment, which few printers could sustain, of delivering every 
week three thousand copies of nine sheets." On the 
8th of May, 1788, the three concluding volumes were 
published, and Gibbon had discharged his debt for the 
entertainment that he had had in this world. 

He returned as speedily as he could to Lausanne, to 
rest from his labours. But he had a painful greeting in 
the sadly altered look of his friend Deyverdun. Soon 
an apoplectic seizure confirmed his forebodings, and 
within a twelvemonth the friend of his youth, whom 
he had loved for thirty-three years, was taken away 
by death (July 4, 1789). 1 

1 The letter in which Gibbon communicated the sad news to 
Lord Sheffield was written on the 14th July, 1789, the day of the 
taking of the Bastille. So "that evening sun of July" sent its 
beams on Gibbon mourning the dead friend, as well as on "reapers 
amid peaceful woods and fields, on old women spinning m cottages, 
on shipo far out on the silent main, on balls at the Oiangerie of 



138 GIBBON". [chap. 

Gibbon never got over this loss. His staid and solid 
nature was not given to transports of joy or grief. 
But his constant references to "poor Deyverdun," and 
the vacancy caused by his loss, show the depth of the 
wound. " I want to change the scene," he writes, " and, 
beautiful as the garden and prospect must appear to 
every eye, I feel that the state of my mind casts a gloom 
over them : every spot, every walk, every bench recalls 
the memory of those hours, those conversations, which 
will return no more. ... I almost hesitate whether I shall 
run over to England to consult with you on the spot, 
and to fly from poor Deyverdun's shade, which meets 
me at every turn." Not that he lacked attached 
friends, and of mere society and acquaintance he had 
more than abundance. He occupied at Lausanne a 
position of almost patriarchal dignity, " and may be 
said," writes Lord Sheffield, "to have almost given the 
law to a set of as willing subjects as any man ever 
presided over." Soon the troubles in France sent 
wave after wave of emigrants over the frontiers, and 
Lausanne had its full share of the exiles. After a brief 
approval of the reforms in France he passed rapidly to 
doubt, disgust, and horror at the "new birth of time" 
there. "You will allow me to be a tolerable historian," 
he wrote to his stepmother, " yet on a fair review of 
ancient and modern times I can find none that bear 
any affinity to the present." The last social evolution 
was beyond his power of classification. The mingled 
bewilderment and anger with which he looks but from 
Lausanne on the revolutionary welter, form an almost 
amusing contrast to his usual apathy on political matters. 

Versailles, where higli-rouged dames of the palace are even now 
dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers." 



vin.] THE LAST YEAES IX LAUSANNE. 139 

He is full of alarm lest England should catcli the revolu- 
tionary fever. He is delighted with Burke's- Reflec- 
tions. " I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, 
I adore his chivalry, and I can forgive even his 
superstition." His wrath waxes hotter at every post. 
" Poor France ! The state is dissolved ! the nation is 
mad." At last nothing but vituperation can express his 
feelings, and he roundly calls the members of the Con- 
vention u devils," and discovers that " democratical prin- 
ciples lead by a path of flowers into the abyss of hell." 
In 1790 his friends the Neckers had fled to Switzer- 
land, and on every ground of duty and inclination he was 
called upon to show them the warmest welcome, and he 
did so in a way that excited their liveliest gratitude. 
Necker was cast down in utter despair, not only for the 
loss of place and power, but on account of the strong 
animosity which was shown to him by the exiled French, 
none of whom would set their foot in his house. The 
Neckers were now Gibbon's chief intimates till the end 
of his sojourn in Switzerland. They lived at Coppet, and 
constant visits were exchanged there and at Lausanne. 
Madame Necker wrote to him frequent letters, which 
prove that if she had ever had any grievance to com- 
plain of in the past, it was not only forgiven, but en- 
tirely forgotten. The letters, indeed, testify a warmth 
of sentiment on her part which, coming from a lady of 
less spotless propriety, would almost imply a revival of 
youtLful affection for her early lover. "You have 
always been dear to me," she writes, "but the friend- 
ship you have shown to M. Necker adds to that which 
you inspire me with on so many grounds, and I love 
you at present with a double affection." — " Come to us 
When you are restored to health and to yourself ; th it 
K 1 



140 GIBBON. [chap. 

moment should always belong to your first and your 
last friend (amie), and I do not know which of those 
titles is the sweetest and dearest to my heart ' — 
" Near you, the recollections you recalled were pleasant 
to me, and you connected them easily with present 
impressions ; the chain of years seemed to link all 
times together with electrical rapidity ; you were at 
once twenty and fifty years old for me Away from 
you the different places, which 1 have inhabited are only 
the milestones of my life telling me of the distance 
I have come." With much more in the same strain. 
Of Madame de Stael Gibbon does not speak in very 
warm praise. Her mother, who was far from being 
contented with her, may perhaps have prejudice 1 him 
against her. In one letter to him she complains of her 
daughter's conduct in no measured terms Yet Gibbon 
owns that Madame de Stael was a "'pleasant little 
woman ;" and in anothe. place says that she was " wild, 
vain, but good-natured, with a much larger provision of 
wit than of beauty." One wonders if he ever knew of 
her childish scheme of marrying him in order that her 
parents might always have the pleasure of his company 
and conversation. 

These closing years of Gibbon's life were not happy, 
throug i no fault of his. No man was less inclined by 
disposition to look at the dark side 'of things. But 
heavy blows fell on him in quick succession. His 
health was seriously impaired, and he was often laid up 
for months with the gout. His neglect cf exercise had 
produced its effect, and he had become a prodigy of 
unwieldy corpulency. Unfortunately his digestion 
seems to have continued only too good, and neither his 
own observation nor the medical science of that day 



viil] THE LAST YEARS IN LAUSANNE. 141 

sufficed to warn him against certain errors of regimen 
which were really fatal. All this time, while the gout 
was constantly torturing him, he drank Madeira freely. 
There is frequent question of a pipe of that sweet wine 
in his correspondence with Lord Sheffield. He cannot 
bear the thought of being without a sufficient supply, as 
" good Madeira is now become essential to his health and 
reputation." The last three years of his residence at 
Lausanne were agitated by perpetual anxiety and dread 
of an invasion of French democratic principles, or even 
of French troops. Reluctance to quit "his paradise" 
keeps him still, but he is always wondering how soon 
he will have to fly, and often regrets that he has not 
done so already. "For my part," he writes, "till 
Geneva falls, I do not think of a retreat ; but at all 
events I am provided with two strong horses and a 
hundred louis in gold." Fate was hard on the kindly 
epicurean, who after his long toil had made his bed in 
the sun, on which he was preparing to lie down in genial 
content till the end came. But he feels he must not 
think of rest ; and that, heavy as he is, and irksome to 
him as it is to move, he must before long be a rover 
again. Still he is never peevish upon his fortune ; he 
puts the best face on things as long as they will 
bear it. 

He was not so philosophical under the bereavements 
that he now suffered. His aunt, Mrs. Porten, had died 
in 1786. He deplored her as he was bound to do, and 
feelingly regrets and blames himself for not having 
written to her as often as he might have done since their 
last parting. Then came the irreparable loss of Dey- 
verdun. Shortly, an old Lausanne friend, M. de Severy, 
to whom he was much attached, died after a long illness. 



142 GIBBON. [chap. 

Lastly and suddenly, came the death of Lady Sheffield, 
the wife of his friend Holroyd, with whom he had long 
lived on such intimate terms that he was in the habit of 
calling her his sister. The Sheffields, father and mother 
and two daughters, had spent the summer of 1791 with 
him at Lausanne. The visit was evidently an occasion 
of real happiness and epanchement de coeur to the two 
old friends, and supplied Gibbon for nearly two years 
with tender regrets and recollections. Then, without 
any warning, he heard of Lady Sheffield's death. In 
a moment his mind was made up : he would go at once 
to console his friend. All the fatigue and irksomeness 
of the journey to one so ailing and feeble, all the dangers 
of the road lined and perhaps barred by hostile armies, 
vanished on the spot. Within twelve days he had 
made his preparations and started on his journey. 
He was forced to travel through Germany, and in his 
ignorance of the language he required an interpreter ; 
young de Severy, the son of his deceased friend, 
joyfully, and out of mere affection for him, undertook 
the office of courier. "His attachment to me," wrote 
Gibbon, " is the sole motive which prompts him to un- 
dertake this troublesome journey." It is clear that 
he had the art of making himself loved. He travelled 
through Frankfort, Cologne, Brussels, Ostend, and was 
by his friend's side in little more than a month after 
he had received the fatal tidings. Well might Lord 
Sheffield say, " I must ever regard it as the most en- 
during proof of his sensibility, and of his possessing the 
true spirit of friendship, that, after having relinquished 
the thought of his intended visit, h© hastened to England, 
in spite of increasing impediments, to soothe me by the 
most generous sympathy, and to alleviate my domestic 



chap, viit.] THE LAST YEARS IN LAUSANNE. 143 

affliction ; neither his great corpulency nor his extra- 
ordinary bodily infirmities, nor any other consideration, 
could prevent him a moment from resolving on an 
undertaking that might have deterred the most active 
young man. He almost immediately, with an alertness 
by no means natural to him, undertook a great circuitous 
journey along the frontier of an enemy worse than savage, 
within the sound of their cannon, within the range of the 
light troops of the different armies, and through roads 
ruined by the e normous machinery of war." 

In this public and private gloom he bade for ever 
farewell to Lausanne. He was himself rapidly ap- 
proaching 

" The dark portal, 
Goal of all mortal," 

but of this he knew not as yet. While he is in the 
house of mourning, beside his bereaved friend, we will 
return for a short space to consider the conclusion of 
his great work. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE LAST THEEE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 

The thousand years between the fifth and the fifteenth 
century comprise the middle age, a period which only 
recently, through utterly inadequate conceptions of 
social growth, was wont to be called the dark ages. 
That long epoch of travail and growth, during which 
the old field of civilisation was broken up and sown 
afresh with new and various seed unknown to antiquity, 
receives now on all hands due recognition, as being one 
of the most rich, fertile, and interesting in the history 
of man. The all-embracing despotism of Rome was re- 
placed by the endless local divisions and subdivisions 
of feudal tenure. The multiform rites and beliefs of 
polytheism were replaced by the single faith and para- 
mount authority of the Catholic Church. The philo- 
sophies of Greece were dethroned, and the scholastic 
theology reigned in their stead. The classic tongues 
crumbled away, and out of their debris arose the modern 
idioms of France, Italy, and Spain, to which were added 
in Northern Europe the new forms of Teutonic speech. 
The fine and useful arts took a new departure ; slavery 
was mitigated into serfdom ; industry and commerce 
became powers in the world as they had never been 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 145 

before ; the narrow municipal polity of the old world 
was in time succeeded by the broader national institu- 
tions based on various forms of representation. Gun- 
powder, America, and the art of printing were dis- 
covered, and the most civilised portion of mankind 
passed insensibly into the modern era. 

Such was the wide expanse which spread out before 
Gibbon when he resolved to continue his work frOm the 
fall of the Western Empire to the capture of Constanti- 
nople. Indeed his glance took in a still wider field, as 
he was concerned as much with the decay of Eastern 
as of Western Rome, and the long retarded fall of the 
former demanded large attention to the Oriental popu- 
lations who assaulted the city and remaining empire of 
Constantine. So bold an historic enterprise was never 
conceived as when, standing on the limit of antiquity in 
the fifth century, he determined to pursue in rapid but 
not hasty survey the great lines of events for a thousand 
years, to follow in detail the really great transactions 
while discarding the less important, thereby giving 
prominence and clearness to what is memorable, and 
reproducing on a small scale the flow of time through 
the ages. It is to this portion of Gibbon's work that 
the happy comparison has been made, that it resembles 
a magnificent Roman aqueduct spanning over the chasm 
which separates the ancient from the modern world. In 
these latter volumes he frees himself from the trammels 
of regular annalistic narrative, deals with events in 
broad masses according to their importance, expanding 
or contracting his story as occasion requires ; now 
painting in large panoramic view the events of a few 
years, now compressing centuries into brief outline. 
Many of his massive chapters afford materials for 



146 GIBBON". [chap. 

volumes, and are well worthy of a fuller treatment than 
he could give without deranging his plan. But works 
of greater detail and narrower compass can never com- 
pete with Gibbon's history, any more than a county map 
can compete with a map of England or of Europe. 

The variety of the contents of these last three 
volumes is amazing, especially when the thoroughness 
and perfection of the workmanship are considered. 
Prolix compilations or sketchy outlines of universal his 
tory have their use and place, but they are removed by 
many degrees from the Decline and Fall, or rather they 
belong to another species of authorship. It is not only 
that Gibbon combines width and depth, that the extent 
of his learning is as wonderful as its accuracy, though 
in this respect he has hardly a full rival in literature. 
The quality which places him not only in the first rank 
of historians, but in a class by himself, and makes him 
greater than the greatest, lies in his supreme power of 
moulding into lucid and coherent unity, the manifold 
and rebellious mass of his multitudinous materials, of 
coercing his divergent topics into such order that they 
seem spontaneously to grow like branches out of one 
stem, clear and visible to the mind. There is something 
truly epic in these latter volumes. Tribes, nations, and 
empires are the characters ; one after another they 
come forth like Homeric heroes, and do their mighty 
deeds before the assembled armies. The grand and 
lofty chapters on Justinian ; on the Arabs ; on the 
Crusades, have a rounded completeness, coupled with 
such artistic subordination to the main action, that they 
read more like cantos of a great prose poem than the 
ordinary staple of historical composition. It may well 
be questioned whether there is another instance of c, ich 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 147 

high literary form and finish, coupled with such vast 
erudition. And two considerations have to be borne in 
mind, which heighten Gibbon's merit in this respect. 
(1.) Almost the whole of his subject had been as yet 
untouched by any preceding writer of eminence, and 
he had no stimulus or example from his precursors. 
He united thus in himself the two characters of 
pioneer and artist. (2.) The barbarous and imperfect 
nature of the materials with which he chiefly had to 
work, — dull inferior writers, whose debased style was 
their least defect. A historian who has for his 
authorities masters of reason and language such as 
Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus is borne up 
by their genius ; apt quotation and translation alone 
suffice to produce considerable effects ; or in the case of 
subjects taken from modern times, weighty state papers, 
eloquent debates, or finished memoirs supply ample 
materials for graphic narrative. But Gibbon had little 
but dross to deal with. Yet he has smelted and cast it 
into the grand shapes we see. 

The fourth volume is nearly confined to the reign, or 
rather epoch, of Justinian, — a magnificent subject, which 
he has painted in his loftiest style of gorgeous narrative. 
The campaigns of Belisarius and Narses are related with 
a clearness and vigour that make us feel that Gibbon's 
merits as a military historian have not been quite 
sufficiently recognised. He had from the time of his 
service in the militia taken continued interest in tactics 
and all that was connected with the military art. It 
was no idle boast when he said that the captain of the 
Hampshire grenadiers had not been useless to the 
historian of the Roman empire. Military matters per- 
haps occupy a somewhat excessive space in his pages. 

>7# 



148 GIBBON. [chap. 

Still, if the operations of war are to be related, it is 
highly important that they should be treated with 
intelligence, and knowledge how masses of men are 
moved, and by a writer to whom the various incidents 
of the camp, the march, and the bivouac, are not 
matters of mere hearsay, but of personal experience. 
The campaign of Belisarius in Africa may be quoted 
as an example. 

" In the seventh year of the reign of Justinian, and about the 
time of the summer solstice, the whole fleet of six hundred 
ships was ranged in martial pomp before the gardens of the 
palace. The patriarch pronounced his benediction, the emperor 
signified his last commands, the general's trumpet gave the 
signal of departure, and . every heart, according to its fears or 
wishes, explored with anxious curiosity the omens of misfortune 
or success. The first halt was made at Perintheus, or Heraclea, 
where Belisarius waited five days to receive some Thracian 
horses, a military gift of his sovereign. From thence the fleet 
pursued their course through the midst of the Propontis ; but 
as they struggled to pass the straits of the Hellespont, an 
unfavourable wind detained them four days at Abydos, where 
the general exhibited a remarkable lesson of firmness and 
severity. Two of the Huns who, in a drunken quarrel, had 
slain one of their fellow-soldiers, were instantly shown to the 
army suspended on a lofty gibbet. The national dignity was 
resented by their countrymen, who disclaimed the servile laws 
of the empire and asserted the free privileges of Scythia, where 
a small fine was allowed to expiate the sallies of intemperance 
and anger. Their complaints were specious, their clamours 
were loud, and the Romans were not averse to the example of 
disorder and impunity. But the rising sedition was appeased 
by the authority and eloquence of the general, and he repre- 
sented to the assembled troops the obligation of justice, the 
importance of discipline, the rewards of piety and virtue, and 
the unpardonable guilt of murder, which, in his apprehension, 
was aggravated rather than excused by the vice of intoxication. 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 149 

In the navigation from the Hellespont to the Peloponnesus, 
which the Greeks after the siege of Troy had performed in 
four days, the fleet of Belisarius was guided in their course 
by his master-galley, conspicuous in the day by the redness 
of the sails, and in the night by torches blazing from the 
masthead. It was the duty of the pilots as they steered 
between the islands and turned the capes of Malea and 
Tasnarium to preserve the just order and regular intervals of 
such a multitude. As the wind was fair and moderate, their 
labours were not unsuccessful, and the troops were safely 
tlisembarked at Methone, on the Messenian coast, to repose 
themselves for a while after the fatigues of the sea. . . . From 
the port of Methone the pilots steered along the western coast 
of Peloponnesus, as far as the island of Zacynthus, or Zante, 
before they undertook the voyage (in their eyes a most arduous 
voyage) of one hundred leagues over the Ionian sea. As the 
fleet was surprised by a calm, sixteen days were consumed 
in the slow navigation. . . At length the harbour of Caucana, 
on the southern side of Sicily, afforded a secure and hospitable 
shelter. . . Belisarius determined to hasten his operations, and 
his wise impatience was seconded by the winds. The fleet 
lost sight of Sicily, passed before the island of Malta, dis- 
covered the capes of Africa, ran along the coast with a strong 
gale from the north-east, and finally cast anchor at the pro- 
montory of Caput Vada, about five days journey to the south 

of Carthage 

" Three months after their departure from Constantinople, 
the men and the horses, the arms and the military stores 
were safely disembarked, and five soldiers were left as a 
guard on each of the ships, which were disposed in the form 
of a semicircle. The remainder of the troops occupied a 
camp on the seashore, which they fortified, according to 
ancient discipline, with a ditch and rampart, and the dis- 
covery of a source of fresh water, while it allayed the thirst, 
excited the superstitious confidence of the EomaDS. . . The 
small town of Sullecte, one day's journey from the camp, had 
the honour ot being foremost to open her gates and resume 
her ancient allegiance ; the larger cities of Leptis and Adru- 



150 GIBBON. [chjlp. 

inetum imitated the example of loyalty as soon as Belisarius 
appeared, and he advanced without opposition as far as Grasse, * 
a palace of the Vandal kings, at the distance of fifty miles | 
from Carthage. The weary Romans indulged themselves in 
the refreshment of shady groves, cool fountains, and delicious 
fruits. . . In three generations prosperity and a warm climate 
had dissolved the hardy virtue of the Vandals, who insensibly 
became the most luxurious of mankind. In their villas and 
gardens, which might deserve the Persian name of Paradise, 
they enjoyed a cool and elegant repose, and after the daily use 
of the bath, the barbarians were seated at a table profusely 
spread with the delicacies of the land and sea. Their silken 
robes, loosely flowing after the fashion of the Medes, were em- 
broidered with gold, love and hunting were the labours of their 
life, and their vacant hours were amused by pantomimes, chariot- 
races, and the music and dances of the theatre. 

" In a march of twelve days the vigilance of Belisarius was j 
constantly awake and active against his unseen enemies, by whom 
in every place and at every hour he might be suddenly attacked. 
An officer of confidence and merit, John the Armenian, led the 
vanguard of three hundred horse. Six hundred Massagetse 
covered at a certain distance the left flank, and the whole fleet, 
steering along the coast, seldom lost sight of the army, which 
moved each day about twelve miles, and lodged in the evening 
in strong camps or in friendly towns. The near approach of 
the Romans to Carthage filled the mind of Gelimer with anxiety \ 
and terror 

" Yet the authority and promises of Gelimer collected a for- 
midable army, and his plans were concerted with some degree 
of military skill. An order was despatched to his brother 
Ammatas to collect all the forces of Carthage, and to encounter 
the van of the Roman army at the distance of ten miles from 
the city : his nephew Gibamund with two thousand horse was ' 
destined to attack their left, when the monarch himself, who 
silently followed, should charge their rear in a situation which 
excluded them from the aid and even the view of their fleet. 
But the rashness of Ammatas was fatal to himself and his 
country. He anticipated the hour of attack, outstripped his 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 151 

tardy followers, and was pierced with a mortal wound, after he 
had slain with his own hand twelve of his boldest antagonists. 
His Vandals fled to Carthage : the highway, almost ten miles, 
was strewed with dead bodies, and it seemed incredible that 
such multitudes could be slaughtered by the swords of three 
hundred Romans. The nephew of Gelimer was defeated after 
a slight combat by the six hundred Massagetae ; they did not 
equal the third part of his numbers, but each Scythian was 
fired by the example of his chief, who gloriously exercised the 
privilege of his family by riding foremost and alone to shoot the 
first arrow against the enemy. In the meantime Gelimer him- 
self, ignorant of the event, and misguided by the windings of 
the hills, inadvertently passed the Roman army and reached 
the scene of action where Ammatas had fallen. He wept the 
fate of his brother and of Carthage, charged with irresistible 
fury the advancing squadrons, and might have pursued and 
perhaps decided the victory, if he had not wasted those 
inestimable moments in the discharge of a vain though pious 
duty to the dead. While his spirit was broken by this mournful 
office, he heard the trumpet of Belisarius, who, leaving Antonina 
and his infantry in the camp, pressed forward with his guards 
and the remainder of the cavalry to rally his flying troops, and 
to restore the fortune of the day. Much room could not be 
found in this disorderly battle for the talents of a general ; but 
the king fled before the hero, and the Vandals, accustomed only 
to a Moorish enemy, were incapable of withstanding the arms 

and the discipline of the Romans 

" As soon as the tumult had subsided, the several parts of the 
army informed each other of the accidents of the day, and Beli- 
sarius pitched his camp on the field of victory, to which the tenth 
milestone from Carthage had applied the Latin appellation of 
Decimus. From a wise suspicion of the stratagems and resources 
of the Vandals, he marched the next day in the order of battle ; 
halted in the evening before the gates of Carthage, and allowed 
a night of repose, that he might not, in darkness and disorder, 
expose the city to the licence of the soldiers, or the soldiers 
themselves to the secret ambush of the city. But as the fears 
of Belisarius were the result of calm and intrepid reason, he 






152 GIBBON. [chap. 

was soon satisfied that he might confide without danger in the 
peaceful and friendly aspect of the capital. Carthage blazed 
with innumerable torches, the signal of the public joy ; the chain 
was removed that guarded the entrance of the port, the gates 
were thrown open, and the people with acclamations of gratitude 
hailed and invited their Roman deliverers. The defeat of the 
Vandals and the freedom of Africa were announced to the city 
on the eve of St. Cyprian, when the churches were already 
adorned and illuminated for the festival of the martyr whom 
three centuries of superstition had almost raised to a local 
deity. . . One awful hour reversed the fortunes of the contend- 
ing parties. The suppliant Vandals, who had so lately indulged 
the vices of conquerors, sought an humble refuge in the sanctuary 
of the church ; while the merchants of the east were delivered 
from the deepest dungeon of the palace by their affrighted 
keeper, who implored the protection of his captives, and showed 
them through an aperture in the wall the sails of the "Roman 
fleet. After their separation from the army, the naval com- 
manders had proceeded with slow caution along the coast, till 
they reached the Hermsean promontory, and obtained the first 
intelligence of the victory of Belisarius. Faithful to his in- 
structions, they would have cast anchor about twenty miles 
from Carthage, if the more skilful had not represented the perils 
of the shore and the signs of an impending tempest. Still 
ignorant of the revolution, they declined however the rash 
attempt of forcing the chain of the port, and the adjacent 
harbour and suburb of Mandracium were insulted only by the 
rapine of a private officer, who disobeyed and deserted his 
leaders. But the imperial fleet, advancing with a fair wind, 
steered through the narrow entrance of the Goletta and occupied 
the deep and capacious Jake of Tunis, a secure station about 
five miles from the capital. No sooner was Belisarius informed 
of the arrival than he despatched orders that the greatest part 
of the mariners should be immediately landed to join the 
triumph and to swell the apparent numbers of the Bomans. 
Before he allowed them to enter the gates of Carthage he ex- 
horted them, in a discourse worthy Gf himself and the occasion, 
not to disgrace the glory of their arms, and to remember that 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 153 

the Vandals had been the tyrants, but that they were the 
deliverers of the Africans, who must now be respected as the 
voluntary and affectionate subjects of their common sovereign. 
The Eomans marched through the street in close ranks, prepared 
for battle if an enemy had appeared ; the strict order maintained 
by their general imprinted on their minds the duty of obedience ; 
and in an age in which custom and impunity almost sanctified 
the abuse of conquest, the genius of one man repressed the 
passions of a victorious army. The voice of menace and com- 
plaint was silent, the trade of Carthage was not interrupted ; 
while Africa changed her master and her government, the shops 
continued open and busy ; and the soldiers, after sufficient 
guards had been posted, modestly departed to the houses which 
had been allotted for their reception. Belisarius fixed his 
residence in the palace, seated himself on .the throne of 
Genseric, accepted and distributed the barbaric spoil, granted 
their lives to the suppliant Vandals, and laboured to restore the 
damage which the suburb of Mandracium had sustained in the 
preceding night. At supper he entertained his principal officers 
with the form and magnificence of a royal banquet. The victor 
was respectfully served by the captive officers of the household, 
and in the moments of festivity, when the impartial spectators 
applauded the fortune and merit of Belisarius, his envious 
flatterers secretly shed their venom on every word and gesture 
which might alarm the suspicions of a jealous monarch. One 
day was given to these pompous scenes, which may not be de- 
spised as useless if they attracted the popular veneration ; but 
the active mind of Belisarius, which in the pride of victory 
could suppose defeat, had already resolved that the Roman 
empire in Africa should not depend on the chance of arms or 
the favour of the people. The fortifications of Carthage had 
alone been excepted from the general proscription ; but in the 
reign of ninety-five years they were suffered to decay by the 
thoughtless and indolent Vandals. A wiser conqueror restored 
with incredible despatch the walls and ditches of the city. 
His liberality encouraged the workmen ; the soldiers, the 
mariners, and the citizens vied with each other in the salutary 
labour ; and Gelimer, who had feared to trust his person in an 



154 GIBBON. [chap. 

open town, beheld with astonishment and despair the risiug 
strength of an impregnable fortress. 

But we have hardly finished admiring the brilliant 
picture of the conquest of Africa and Italy, before Gibbon 
gives us further proofs of his many-sided culture and 
catholicity of mind. His famous chapter on the Roman 
law has been accepted by the most fastidious experts of 
an esoteric science as a masterpiece of knowledge, con- 
densation, and lucidity. It has actually been received 
as a textbook in some of the continental universities, 
published separately with notes and illustrations. 
"When we consider the neglect of Roman jurisprudence 
in England till quite recent times, and its severe study 
on the Continent, we shall better appreciate the mental 
grasp and vigour which enabled an unprofessional Eng- 
lishman in the last century to produce such a dissertation. 
A little further on (chapter forty-seven) the history of 
the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the controversies that 
sprang up around it, are discussed with a subtlety worthy 
of a scientific theologian. It is perhaps the first attempt 
towards a philosophical history of dogma, less patient 
and minute than the works of the specialists of modern 
Germany on the same subject, but for spirit, clearness, 
and breadth it is superior to those profound but some- 
what barbarous writers. The flexibility of intellect 
which can do justice in quick succession to such diverse 
subjects is very extraordinary, and assuredly implies great 
width of sympathy and large receptivity of nature. 

Having terminated the period of Justinian, Gibbon 
makes a halt, and surveys the varied and immense scene 
through which he will presently pass in many directions. 
He rapidly discovers ten main lines, along which he will 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 155 

advance in succession to his final goal, the conquest of 
Constantinople. The two pages at the commencement of 
the forty eighth chapter, in which he sketches out the 
remainder of his plan and indicates the topics which he 
means to treat, are admirable as a luminous precis, and 
for the powerful grasp which they show of his immense 
subject. It lay spread out all before him, visible in 
every part to his penetrating eye, and he seems to 
rejoice in his conscious strength and ability to under- 
take the historical conquest on which he is about to set 
out. " Nor will this scope of narrative," he says, " the 
riches and variety of these materials, be incompatible 
with the unity of design and composition. As in his 
daily prayers the Mussulman of Fez or Delhi still turns 
his face towards the temple of Mecca, the historian's 
eye will always be fixed on the city of Constantinople." 
Then follows the catalogue of nations and empires 
whose fortunes he means to sing. A grander vision, 
a more majestic procession, never swept before the 
mind's eye of poet or historian. 

And the practical execution is worthy of the initial 
inspiration. After a rapid and condensed narrative of 
Byzantine history till the end of the twelfth century, 
he takes up the brilliant theme of Mahomet and his 
successors. A few pages on the climate and physical 
features of Arabia fittingly introduce the subject. And 
it may be noted in passing that Gibbon's attention to 
geography, and his skill and taste for geographical de- 
scription, are remarkable among his many gifts. He 
was as diligent a student of maps and travels as of his- 
torical records, and seems to have had a rare faculty of 
realising in imagination scenes and countries of which he 
had only read. In three chapters, glowing with oriental 
L 



15$ GIBBON. [chap. 

colour and rapid as a charge of Arab horse, he tells the 
story of the prophet and the Saracen empire. Then the 
Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Russians appear on the 
scene, to be soon followed by the Normans, and their 
short but brilliant dominion in Southern Italy. But 
now the Seljukian Turks are emerging from the depths 
of Asia, taking the place of the degenerate Saracens, in- 
vading the Eastern empire and conquering Jerusalem. 
The two waves of hostile fanaticism soon meet in the 
Crusades. The piratical seizure of Constantinople by 
the Latins brings in view the French and Venetians, the 
family of Courtenay and its pleasant digression. Then 
comes the slow agony of the restored Greek empire. 
Threatened by the Moguls, it is invaded and dismembered 
by the Ottoman Turks. Constantinople seems ready to 
fall into their hands. But the timely diversion of Tamer- 
lane produces a respite of half a century. Nothing 
can be more artistic than Gibbon's management of his 
subject as he approaches its termination. He, who is 
such a master of swift narrative, at this point introduces 
artful pauses, suspensions of the final catastrophe, which 
heighten our interest in the fate which is hanging over 
the city of Constantine. In 1425 the victorious Turks 
have conquered all the Greek empire save the capital. 
Amurath II. besieged it for two months, and was only 
prevented from taking it by a domestic revolt in Asia 
Minor. At the end of his sixty-fifth chapter Gibbon leaves 
Constantinople hanging on the brink of destruction, and 
paints in glowing colours the military virtues of its 
deadly enemies, the Ottomans. Then he interposes one 
of his most finished chapters, of miscellaneous contents, 
but terminating in the grand and impressive pages on 
the revival of learning in Italy. There we read of the 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 157 

"curiosity and emulation of the Latins," of the zeal of 
Petrarch and the success of Boccace in Greek studies, 
of Leontius, Pilatus, Bessarion, and Lascaris. A glow 
of sober enthusiasm warms the great scholar as he 
paints the early light of that happy dawn. He admits 
that the " arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the 
Muses " from Greece to Italy. But he " trembles at the 
thought that Greece might have been overwhelmed with 
her schools and libraries, before Europe had emerged from 
the deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of science 
might have been scattered on the winds, before the Italian 
soil was prepared for their cultivation." In one of the 
most perfect sentences to be found in English prose he 
thus describes the Greek tongue : "In their lowest 
depths of servitude and depression, the subjects of the 
Byzantine throne were still possessed of a golden key 
that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a 
musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the 
objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philo- 
sophy." Meanwhile we are made to feel that the 
subjects of the Byzantine throne, with their musical 
speech, that Constantinople with her libraries and 
schools, will all soon fall a prey to the ravening and 
barbarous Turk. This brightening light of the Western 
sky contending with the baleful gloom which is settling 
down over the East, is one of the most happy contrasts 
in historical literature. Then comes the end, the pre- 
parations and skill of the savage invader, the futile but 
heroic defence, the overwhelming ruin which struck 
down the Cross and erected the Crescent over the city 
of Constantine the Great. 

It is one of the many proofs of Gibbon's artistic 
instinct that he did not end with this great eatastrophe. 



158 GIBBON. [chap. 

On the contrary, he adds three more chapters. His fine 
tact warned him that the tumult and thunder of the 
final ruin must not be the last sounds to strike the 
ear. A resolution of the discord was needed ; a soft 
chorale should follow the din and lead to a mellow 
adagio close. And this he does with supreme skill. 
With ill-suppressed disgust, he turns from New to Old 
Rome. " Constantinople no longer appertains to the 
Roman historian — nor shall I enumerate the civil and 
religious edifices that were profaned or erected by its 
Turkish masters." Amid the decayed temples and 
mutilated beauty of the Eternal City, he moves down 
to a melodious and pathetic conclusion — piously visits 
the remaining fragments of ancient splendour and art, 
deplores and describes the ravages wrought by time, 
and still more by man, and recurring once again to the 
scene of his first inspiration, bids farewell to the Roman 
empire among the ruins of the Capitol. 

"We have hitherto spoken in terms of warm, though 
perhaps not excessive eulogy of this great work. But 
praise would lack the force of moderation and equipoise, 
if allusion were not made to some of its defects. The 
pervading defect of it all has been already referred 
to in a preceding chapter — an inadequate conception of 
society as an organism, living and growing, like other 
organisms, according to special laws of its own. In 
these brilliant volumes on the Middle Ages, the special 
problems which that period suggests are not stated, far 
less solved ; they are not even suspected. The feudal 
polity, the Catholic Church, the theocratic supremacy of 
the Popes, considered as institutions which the historian 
is called upon to estimate and judge ; the gradual disso- 
lution of both feudalism and Catholicism, brought 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 159 

about by the spread of industry in the temporal order 
and of science in the spiritual order, are not even 
referred to. Many more topics might be added to this 
list of weighty omissions. It would be needless to 
say that no blame attaches to Gibbon for neglecting 
views of history which had not emerged in his time, if 
there were not persons who, forgetting the slow pro- 
gress of knowledge, are apt to ascribe the defects of a 
book to incompetence in its author. If Gibbon's con- 
ception of the Middle Ages seems to us inadequate now, 
it is because since his time our conceptions of society in 
that and in all periods have been much enlarged. We 
may be quite certain that if Gibbon had had our ex- 
perience, no one would have seen the imperfections of 
particular sides of his work as we now have it more 
clearly than he. 

Laying aside, therefore, reflexions of this kind as 
irrelevant and unjust, we may ask whether there are 
any other faults which may fairly be found with him. 
One must admit that there are. After all, they are not 
very important. 

(1.) Striking as is his account of Justinian's reign, 
it has two blemishes. First, the offensive details about 
the vices of Theodora. Granting them to be well 
authenticated, which they are not, it was quite un- 
worthy of the author and his subject to soil his pages 
with such a chronique scandaleuse. The defence which he 
sets up in his Memoirs, that he is " justified in painting 
the manners of the times, and that the vices of Theodora 
form an essential feature in the reign and character of 
Justinian," cannot be admitted. First, we are not sure 
that the vices existed, and were not the impure inven- 
tions of a malignant calumniator. Secondly, Gibbon 



160 GIBBOK [chap. 

is far from painting the manners of the time as a 
moralist or an historian ; he paints them with a zest 
for pruriency worthy of Bayle or Brant ome. It was 
an occasion for a wise scepticism to register grave 
doubts as to the infamous stories of Procopius. A 
rehabilitation of Theodora is not a theme calculated to 
provoke enthusiasm, and is impossible besides from the 
entire want of adequate evidence. But a thoughtful 
writer would not have lost his time, if hs referred to 
the subject at all, in pointing out the moral impro- 
bability of the current accounts. He might have 
dwelt on the unsujjported testimony of the only witness, 
the unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself con- 
victs on another subject of flagrant mendacity. But 
he would have been especially slow to believe that a 
woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy 
he has described, would, in consequence of " some 
vision either of sleep or fancy," in which future 
exaltation was promised to her, assume " like a 
skilful actress, a more decent character, relieve her 
poverty by the laudable industry of spinning wool, 
and affect a life of chastity and solitude in a small 
house, which she afterwards changed into a magnificent 
temple." Magdalens have been converted, no doubt, 
from immoral living, but not by considerations of 
astute prudence suggested by day-dreams of imperial 
greatness. Gibbon might have thought of the case 
of Madame de Maintenon, and how her reputation 
fared in the hands of the vindictive courtiers of 
Versailles ; how a woman, cold as ice and pure as 
snow, was freely charged with the most abhorrent vices 
without an atom of foundation. But the truth pro- 
bably is that he never thought of the subject seriously 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 161 

at all, and that, yielding to a regrettable inclination, he 
copied his licentious Greek notes with little reluctance. 

(2.) The character of Belisarius, enigmatical enough 
in itself, is made by him more enigmatical still. He 
concludes the forty first chapter, in which the great 
deeds of the conqueror of Italy and Africa, and the in- 
gratitude with which Justinian rewarded his services, 
are set forth in strong contrast, with the inept remark 
that " Belisarius appears to be either below or above 
the character of a MAN." The grounds of the apparent 
meekness with which Belisarius supported his repeated 
disgraces cannot now be ascertained : but the motives 
of Justinian's conduct are not so difficult to find. As 
Finlay points out in his thoughtful history of Greece, 
Belisarius must have been a peculator on a large and 
dangerous scale. " Though he refused the Gothic throne 
and the empire of the West, he did not despise nor 
neglect wealth : he accumulated riches which could not 
have been acquired by any commander-in-chief amidst 
the wars and famines of the period, without rendering 
the military and civil administration subservient to his 
pecuniary profit. On his return from Italy he lived at 
Constantinople in almost regal splendour, and maintained 
a body of 7,000 cavalry attached to his household. In 
an empire where confiscation was an ordinary financial 
resource, and under a sovereign whose situation rendered 
jealousy only common prudence, it is not surprising that 
the wealth of Belisarius excited the imperial cupidity, 
and induced Justinian to seize great part of it " {Greece 
under the Romans, chap. 3). There is shrewd insight 
in this, and though we may regret that we cannot attain 
to more, it is better than leaving the subject with an 
unmeaning paradox. 



162 GIBBON. [chap. 

It may be said generally that Gibbon has not done 
justice to the services rendered to Europe by the Byzan- 
tine empire. In his crowded forty -eighth chapter, which 
is devoted to the subject, he passes over events and 
characters with such speed that his history in this part 
becomes little more than a chronicle, vivid indeed, but 
barren of thoughtful political views. His account of 
the Isaurian period may be instanced among others as 
an example of defective treatment. If we turn to the 
judicious Finlay, we see what an immense but generally 
unacknowledged debt Europe owes to the Greek empire. 
The saving of Christendom from Mohammedan conquest 
is too easily attributed to the genius of Charles Martel 
and his brave Franks. The victory, at Tours was 
important no doubt, but almost a century previously 
the followers of the prophet had been checked by 
Heraclius; and their memorable repulse before Con- 
stantinople under the Isaurian Leo was the real barrier 
opposed to their conquest of the West. It requires but 
little reflection to see that without this brave resistance 
to the Moslem invasion, the course of medieval history 
would have been completely changed. Next in time, 
but hardly second in value to the services of the Greeks 
at Marathon and Salamis, must be reckoned the services 
of the Byzantine emperors in repelling the barbarians. 
Such an important consideration as this should hardly 
have escaped Gibbon. 

Gibbon's account of Charlemagne is strangely inade- 
quate. It is perhaps the only instance in his work 
where he has failed to appreciate a truly great man, 
and the failure is the more deplorable as it concerns 
one of the greatest men who have ever lived. He did 
not realise the greatness of the man, of his age, or of his 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 163 

work. Properly considered, the eighth century is the 
most important and memorable which Europe has ever 
seen. During its course the geographical limits, the 
ecclesiastical polity, and the feudal system within 
and under which our western group of nations was 
destined to live for five or six centuries, were pro- 
visionally settled and determined. The wonderful 
house of the Carolings, which produced no less than 
five successive rulers of genius (of whom two had 
extraordinary genius, Charles Martel and Charlemagne, 
were the human instruments of this great work. The 
Frankish Monarchy was hastening to ruin when they 
saved it. Saxons in the East and Saracens in the South 
were on the point of extinguishing the few surviving 
embers of civilisation which still existed. The Bishop 
of Home was ready to fall a prey to the Lombards, and 
the progressive papacy of Hildebrand and Innocent 
ran imminent risk of being extirpated at its root. 
Charles and his ancestors prevented these evils. Of 
course it is open to any one to say that there were no 
evils threatening, that Mohammedanism is as good as 
Christianity, that the Papacy was a monstrous calamity, 
that to have allowed Eastern Germany to remain pagan 
and barbarous would have done no harm. The ques- 
tion cannot be discussed here. But every law of historic 
equity compels us to admit that whether the result was 
good or bad, the genius of men who could leave such 
lasting impressions on the world as the Carolings did, 
must have been exceptionally great. And this is what 
Gibbon has not seen ; he has not seen that, whether 
their work was good or bad in the issue, it was colossal. 
His tone in reference to Charlemagne is unworthy to a 
degree. " Without injustice to his fame, I may discern 
8 



16 * GIBBON. [chap. 

some blemishes in the sanctity and greatness of the 
restorer of the Western Empire. Of his moral virtues, 
chastity was not the most conspicuous." This from the 
pen of Gibbon seems hardly serious. Again: " I touch 
with reverence the laws of Charlemagne, so highly ap- 
plauded by a respectable judge. They compose not a 
system, but a series of occasional and minute edicts, 
for the correction of abuses, the reformation of manners, ' 
the economy of his farms, the care of his poultry, and 
even the sale of his eggs." And yet Gibbon had read 
the Capitularies. The struggle and care of the hero to 
master in some degree the wide welter of barbarism 
surging around him, he never recognised. It is a spot 
on Gibbon's fame. 

Dean Milman considers that Gibbon's account of the 
Crusades is the least accurate and satisfactory chapter 
in his history, and "that he has here failed in that 
lucid arrangement which in general gives perspicuity 
to his most condensed and crowded narratives." This 
blame seems to be fully merited, if restricted to the 
second of the two chapters which Gibbon has de- 
voted to the Crusades. The fifty- eighth chapter, in 
which he treats of the First Crusade, leaves nothing to 
be desired. It is not one of his best chapters, though it is 
quite up to his usually high level. But the fifty ninth 
chapter, it must be owned, is not only weak, but what 
is unexampled elsewhere in him, confused and badly 
written. It is not, as in the case of Charlemngne, a 
question of imperfect appreciation of a great man or 
epoch ; it is a matter of careless and slovenly presenta- 
tion of a period which he had evidently mastered with 
his habitual thoroughness, but, owing -to the rapidity 
with which he composed his last volume, he did not do 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 165 

full justice to it. He says significantly in his Memoirs, 
that " he wished that a pause, an inteival, had been 
allowed for a serious revisal " of the last three volumes, 
and there can be little doubt that this chapter was one 
of the sources of his regrets. It is in fact a mere 
tangle. The Second and the Third Crusades are so 
jumbled together, that it is only a reader who knows 
the subject very well who can find his way through the 
labyrinth. Gibbon seems at this point, a thing very 
unusual with him, to have become impatient with his 
subject, and to have wished to hurry over it. " A 
brief parallel," he says, "may save the repetition of 
a tedious narrative." The result of this expeditious 
method has been far from happy. It is the only 
occasion where Gibbon hns failed in his usual high finish 
and admirable literary form. 

Gibbon's style was at one period somewhat of a party 
question. Good Christians felt a scruple in discerning 
any merits in the style of a writer who had treated the 
martyrs of the early Church with so little ceremony 
and generosity. On the other hand, those whose 
opinions approached more or less to his, expatiated on 
the splendour and majesty of his diction. Archbishop 
Whately went out of his way in a note to his Logic to 
make a keen thrust at an author whom it was well to 
depreciate whenever occasion served. "His way of 
writing," he says, " reminds one of those persons who 
never dare look you full in the face." Such criticisms 
are out of date now. The faults of Gibbon's style 
are obvious enough, and its compensatory merits are not 
far to seek. No one can overlook its frequent tumidity 
and constant want of terseness. It lacks suppleness, 
ease, variety. It is not often distinguished by happy 



166 GIBBON. [chap. 

selection of epithet, and seems to ignore all delicacy 
of nuance. A prevailing grandiloquence, which easily 
slides into pomposity, is its greatest blemish. The acute 
Porson saw this and expressed it admirably. In the 
preface to his letters to Archdeacon Travis, he says of 
Gibbon, " Though his style is in general correct and 
elegant, he sometimes ' draws out the thread of his ver- 
bosity finer than the staple of his argument.' In 
endeavouring to avoid vulgar terms he too frequently 
dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts in a 
splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest 
ideas. In short we are too often reminded of that great 
man, Mr. Prig, the auctioneer, whose manner was so 
inimitably fine that he had as much to say on a ribbon 
as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the 
stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, 
rather than the crisp and nervous prose of the best 
French writers. We are constantly offended by a 
superfine diction lavished on barbarous chiefs and rough 
soldiers of the Lower Empire, which almost reproduces 
the high-flown rhetoric in which Corneille's and Racine's 
characters address each other. . Such phrases as the 
" majesty of the throne," " the dignity of the purple," 
the "wisdom of the senate," recur with a rather jarring 
monotony, especially when the rest of the narrative is 
designed to show that there was no majesty nor dignity 
nor wisdom involved in the matter. We feel that the 
writer was thinking more of his sonorous sentence than 
of the real fact. On the other hand, nothing but a want 
of candour or taste, can lead any one to overlook the 
rare and great excellences of Gibbon's style. First of 
all, it is singularly correct : a rather common merit now, 
but not common in his day. But its sustained vigour 



ix.] CONCLUSION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL. 167 

and loftiness will always be uncommon; above all its 
rapidity and masculine length of stride are quite admir- 
able. When he takes up his pen to describe a campaign, 
or any great historic scene, we feel that we shall 
have something worthy of the occasion, that we shall be 
carried swiftly and grandly through it all, without the 
suspicion of a breakdown of any kind being possible. 
An indefinable stamp of weightiness is impressed on 
Gibbon's writing ; he has a baritone manliness which 
banishes everbhing small, trivial, or weak. When he 
is eloquent (and it should be remembered to his credit 
that he never affects eloquence, though he occasionally 
affects dignity), he rises without effort into real grandeur. 
On the whole we may say that his manner, with certain 
manifest faults, is not unworthy of his matter, and the 
praise is great. 

It is not quite easy to give expression to another 
feeling which is often excited in reading Gibbon. 
It is somewhat of this kind, that it is more fitted to 
inspire admiration than love or sympathy. Its merits 
are so great, the mass of information it contains is so 
stupendous, that all competent judges of such work feel 
bound to praise it. Whether they like it in the same 
degree, may be questioned. Among reading men and 
educated persons it is not common — such is my experi- 
ence—to meet with people who know their Gibbon well. 
Superior women do not seem to take to him kindly, 
even when there is no impediment on religious grounds. 
Madame du Deffand, writing to Walpole, says, "I 
whisper it to you, but I am not pleased with Mr. Gib- 
bon's work. It is declamatory, oratorical ... I lay it 
aside without regret, and it requires an effort to take it 
up again." Another of Walpole's correspondents, the 



168 GIBBON. [chap. ix. 

Countess of Ossory, seems to have made similar stric- 
tures. If we admit that women are less capable than 
masculine scholars of doing justice to the strong side of 
Gibbon, we may also acknowledge that they are better 
fitted than men to appreciate and to be shocked by his 
defective side, which is a prevailing want of moral 
elevation and nobility of sentiment, His cheek rarely 
flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause. The tragedy of 
human life never seems to touch him, no glimpse of the 
infinite ever calms and raises the reader of his pages. 
Like nearly all the men of his day, he was of the earth 
earthy, and it is impossible to get over the fact. 









CHAPTER X. 

LAST ILLNESS. — DEATH. CONCLUSION. 



Gibbon had now only about six months to live. He did 
not seem to have suffered by his rapid journey from 
Lausanne to London. During the summer which he 
spent with his friend Lord Sheffield, he was much as 
usual ; only his friend noticed that his habitual dislike 
to motion appeared to increase, and he was so incapable 
of exercise that he was confined to the library and 
dining-room. " Then he joined Mr. F. North in pleasant 
arguments against exercise in general. He ridiculed the 
unsettled and restless disposition that summer, the most 
uncomfortable of all seasons, as he said, generally gives 
to those who have the use of their limbs." The true 
disciples of Epicurus are not always the least stout and 
stoical in the presence of irreparable evils. 

After spending three or four months at Sheffield 
Place, he went to Bath to visit his stepmother, Mrs. 
Gibbon. His conduct to her through life was highly 
honourable to him. It should be remembered that her 
jointure, paid out of his father's decayed estate, was a 
great tax on his small income. In his efforts to improve 
his position by selling his landed property, Mrs. Gibbon 
seems to have been at times somewhat difficult to satisfy 
as regards the security of her interests. It was only 



170 GIBBON". [chap. 

prudent on her part. But it is easy to see what a source 
of alienation and quarrel was here ready prepared, if 
both parties had not risen superior to sordid motives. 
There never seems to have been the smallest cloud 
between them. When one of his properties was sold 
he writes : " Mrs. Gibbon's jointure is secured on the 
Buriton estate, and her legal consent is requisite for the 
sale. Again and again I must repeat my hope that she 
is perfectly satisfied, and that the close of her life may 
not be embittered by suspicion, fear, or discontent. 
"What new security does she prefer — the funds, a mort- 
gage, or your land 1 At all events, she must be made 
easy." So Gibbon left town and lay at Beading on his 
road to Bath : here he passed about ten days with his 
stepmother, who was now nearly eighty years of age. 
"In mind and conversation she is just the same as 
twenty years ago," he writes to Lord Sheffield; "she 
has spirits, appetite, legs, and eyes, and talks of living 
till ninety. I can say from my heart, Amen." And in 
another letter, a few days later, he says : " A tete a-tete of 
eight or nine hours every day is rather difficult to sup- 
port ; yet I do assure you that pur conversation flows 
with more ease and spirit when we are alone, than when 
any auxiliaries are summoned to our aid. She is indeed 
a wonderful woman, and I think all her faculties of the 
mind stronger and more active than I have ever known 
them. .... I shall therefore depart next Friday, but I 
may possibly reckon without my host, as I have not yet 
apprised Mrs. G. of the term of my visit, and will cer- 
tainly not quarrel with her for a short delay." He then 
went to Althorpe, and it is the last evidence of his 
touching a book — " exhausted the morning (of the 5th 
November) among the first editions of Cicero." Then he 
came to London, and in a few days was seized with the 



x.] LAST ILLNESS.— DEATH. 171 

illness which in a little more than two months put an 
end to his life. 

His malady was dropsy, complicated with other dis- 
orders. He had most strangely neglected a very dan- 
gerous symptom for upwards of thirty years, not only 
having failed to take medical advice about it, but even 
avoiding all allusion to it to bosom friends like Lord 
Sheffield. But longer concealment was now impossible. 
He sent for the eminent surgeon Farquhar (the same 
who afterwards attended William Pitt), and he, together 
with Cline, at once recognised the case as one of the utmost 
gravity, though they did not say as much to the patient. 
On Thursday, the 14th of ^November, he was tapped 
and greatly relieved. He said he was not appalled by 
the operation, and during its progress he did not lay 
aside his usual good-humoured pleasantry. He was soon 
out again, but only for a few days, and a fortnight 
after another tapping was necessary. Again he went 
out to dinners and parties, which must have been 
most imprudent at his age and in his state. But 
he does not seem to have acted contrary to medical 
advice. He was very anxious to meet the prime 
minister, William Pitt, with whom he was not ac- 
quainted, though he must have seen him in old days in 
the House. He saw him twice ; once at Eden Farm 
for a whole day, and was much gratified, we are told. 
At last he got to what he called his home — the house of 
his true and devoted friend, Lord Sheffield. " But," 
says the latter, whose narrative of his friend's last 
illness is marked by a, deep and reserved tenderness 
that does him much honour, "this last visit to 
Sheffield Place became far different from any he had 
ever made before. That ready, cheerful, various and 
illuminating conversation which we had before admin a 
M 8* 



172 GIBBON. [chap. 

in him, was not always to be found in the library or the 
drawing-room. He moved with difficulty, and retired 
from company sooner than he had been used to do. On 
the 23rd of December his appetite began to fail him. He 
observed to me that it was a very bad sign with him 
when he could not eat his breakfast, which he had done 
at all times very heartily ; and this seems to have been 
the strongest expression of apprehension that he was 
ever observed to utter." He soon became too ill to 
remain beyond the reach of the highest medical advice. 
On the 7th of January, 1794, he left a houseful of company 
and friends for his lodgings in St. James's Street. On 
arriving he sent the following note to Lord Sheffield, the 
last lines he ever wrote : — 

" St. James's, Four o'Clock, Tuesday. 

"This date says everything. I was almost killed 
between Sheffield Place and East Grinstead by hard, 
frozen, long, and cross ruts, that would disgrace the 
approach of an Indian wigwam. The rest was some- 
what less painful, and I reached this place half dead, 
but not seriously feverish or ill. I found a dinner 
invitation from Lord Lucan ; but what are dinners to 
me ? I wish they did not know of my departure. I 
catch the flying post. What an effort ! Adieu till 
Thursday or Friday." 

The end was not far off. On the 13th of January he 
underwent another operation, and, as usual, experienced 
much relief. " His spirits continued good. He talked 
of passing his time at houses which he had often fre- 
quented with great pleasure — the Duke of Devonshire's, 
Mr. Craufurd's, Lord Spencer's, Lord Lucan' s, Sir Ralph 
Payne's, Mr. Batt's." On the 14th of January "he 
saw some company — Lady Lucan and Lady Spencer — 



x.] LAST ILLNESS.— DEaTH. 173 

and thought himself well enough to omit the opium 
draught which he had been used to take for some time. 
He slept very indifferently ; before nine the next morn- 
ing he rose, but could not eat his breakfast. However, 
he appeared tolerably well, yet complained at times of a 
pain in his stomach. At one o'clock he received a visit 
of an hour from Madame de Sylva ; and at three, his 
friend, Mr. Craufurd, of Auchinames (whom he always 
mentioned with particular regard), called, and stayed 
with him till past five o'clock. They talked, as usual, on 
various subjects ; and twenty hours before his death 
Mr. Gibbon happened to fall into a conversation not 
uncommon with him, on the probable duration of his 
life. He said that he thought himself a good life for 
ten, twelve, or perhaps twenty years. About six he 
ate the wing of a chicken and drank three glasses of 
Madeira. After dinner he became very uneasy and 
impatient, complained a good deal, and appeared so 
weak that his servant was alarmed. 

" During the evening he complained much of his 
stomach, and of a feeling of nausea. Soon after nine, 
he took his opium draught and went to bed. About 
ten he complained of much pain, and desired that warm 
napkins might be applied to his stomach. He almost 
incessantly expressed a sense of pain till about four 
o'clock in the morning, when he said he found his stomach 
much easier. About seven the servant asked whether he 
should send for Mr. Farquhar. He answered, No ; that 
he was as well as the day before. At about half-past 
eight he got out of bed, and said he was ' plus adroit ' 
than he had been for three months past, and got into bed 
again without assistance, better than usual. About nine 
he said he would rise. The servant, however, persuaded 
him to remain in bed till Mr. Farquhar, who was 



174 GIBBON. [chap. 

expected at eleven, should come. Till- about that hour 
he spoke with great facility. Mr. Farquhar came at the 
time appointed, and he was then visibly dying. When 
the valet-de-chambre returned, after attending Mr. 
Farquhar out of the room, Mr. Gibbon said, ' Pourquoi 
est ce que vous me quittez 1 ' This was about half -past 
eleven. At twelve he drank some brandy and water 
from a teapot, and desired his favourite servant to stay 
with him. These were the last words he pronounced 
articulately. To the last he preserved his senses ; and 
when he could no longer speak, his servant having asked 
a question, he made a sign to show that he understood 
him. He was quite tranquil, and did not stir, his eyes 
half shut. About a quarter before one he ceased to 
breathe." He wanted just eighty-three days of fifty- 
seven years of age. 

Thus, in consequence of his own strange self-neglect 
and imprudence, was extinguished one of the most 
richly-stored minds that ever lived. Occurring when it 
did, so near the last summons, Gibbon's prospective hope 
of continued life "for ten, twelve, or twenty years" is 
harshly pathetic, and full of that irony which mocks 
the vain cares of men. But, truly, his forecast was not 
irrational if he had not neglected ordinary precautions 
In spite of his ailments he felt full, and was full, of life, 
when he was cut off. We cannot be sure if lengthened 
days would have added much to his work already 
achieved. There is hardly a parallel case in literature 
of the great powers of a whole life being so concentrated 
on one supreme and magnificent effort. Yet, if he had 
lived to 1804, or as an extreme limit, to 1814, we should 
have been all gainers. In the first place, he certainly 
would have finished his admirable autobiography. We 
cannot imagine what he would have made of it, judging 



X.] POSTHUMOUS WORKS. 175 

from the fragment which exists. And yet that frag- 
ment is almost a masterpiece. But his fertile mind 
had other schemes in prospect; and what such a dili- 
gent worker would have done with a decade or two more 
of years it is impossible to say, except that it is certain 
they would not have been wasted. The extinction of a 
real mind is ever an irreparable loss. 

As it was, he went to his rest after one of the greatest 
victories ever achieved in his own field of humane letters, 
and lived long enough to taste the fruits of his toil. He 
was never puffed up, but soberly and without arrogance 
received his laurels. His unselfish zeal and haste to 
console his bereaved friend showed him warm and loving 
to the last; and we may say that his last serious effort 
was consecrated to the genius of pious friendship. 

In 1796, two years after Gibbon's death, Lord Shef- 
field published two quarto volumes of the historian's 
.miscellaneous works. They have been republished in 
one thick octavo, and many persons suppose that it con- 
tains the whole of the posthumous works ; not unnatu- 
rally, as a fraudulent statement on the title page, 
." complete in one volume," is well calculated to produce 
that impression. But in 1814 Lord Sheffield issued a 
second edition in five volumes octavo, containing much 
additional matter, which additional matter was again 
published in a quarto form, no doubt for the convenience 
of the purchasers of the original quarto edition. 

Of the posthumous works, the Memoirs are by far the 
most important portion. Unfortunately, they were left 
in a most unfinished state, and what we now read is 
nothing else than a mosaic put together by Lord Shef- 
field from six different sketches. Next to the Memoirs 
are the journals and diaries of his studies. As a picture 
of Gibbon's method, zeal, and thoroughness in the 



176 GIBBON. [chap. 

pursuit of knowledge, they are of the highest interest. 
But they refer to an early period of his studies, long 
previous to the concentration of his mind on his great 
work, and one would like to know whether they present 
the best selection that might have been made from these 
records. It is interesting to follow Gibbon in his perusal 
of Homer and Juvenal at five and twenty. But one 
would much like to be admitted to his study when he 
was a far riper scholar, and preparing for or writing the 
Decline and Fall. Lord Sheffield positively prohibited, 
by a clause in his will, any further publication of the 
Gibbon papers, and although Dean Milman was per- 
mitted to see them, it was with the express understand- 
ing that none of their contents should be divulged. 
After the Memoirs and the journals, the most interesting 
portion of the miscellaneous works are The Antiquities 
of the House of Brunswick, which in their present form 
are merely the preparatory sketch of a large work. It 
is too imperfect to allow us to judge of what Gibbon 
even designed to make of it. But it contains some mas- 
terly pages, and the style in many places seems more 
nervous and supple than that of. the Decline and Fall. 
For instance, this account of Albert Azo the Second : — 

" Like one of his Tuscan ancestors Azo the Second was dis- 
tinguished among the princes of Italy by the epithet of the 
Rich. The particulars of his rentroll cannot now be ascertained. 
An occasional though authentic deed of investiture enumerates 
eighty -three fiefs or manors which he held of the empire in 
Lombardy and Tuscany, from the Marquisate of Este to the 
county of Luni ; but to these possessions must be added the 
lands which he enjoyed as the vassal of the Church, the ancient 
patrimony of Otbert (the terra Obertenga.) in the counties of 
Arezzo, Pisa, and Lucca, and the marriage portion of his first 
wife, which, according to the various readings of the manuscripts, 
may be computed either at twenty or two hundred thousand 



x.] MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. 177 

English acres. If such a mass of landed property were now 
accumulated on the head of an Italian nobleman, the annual 
revenue might satisfy the largest demands of private luxury or 
avarice, and the fortunate owner would be rich in the improve- 
ment of agriculture, the manufactures of industry, the refine- 
ment of taste, and the extent of commerce. But the barbarism 
of the eleventh century diminished the income and aggravated 
the expense of the Marquis of Este. In a long series of war 
and anarchy, man and the works of man had been swept away, 
and the introduction of each ferocious and idle stranger had 
been overbalanced by the loss of five or six perhaps of the 
peaceful industrious natives. . The mischievous growth of vege- 
tation, the frequent inundations of the rivers were no longer 
checked by the vigilance of labour ; the face of the country was 
again covered with forests and morasses ; of the vast domains 
which acknowledged Azo for their lord, the far greater part was 
abandoned to the beasts of the field, and a much smaller portion 
was reduced to the state of constant and productive husbandry. 
An adequate rent may be obtained from the skill and substance 
of a free tenant who fertilizes a grateful soil, and enjoys the 
security and benefit of a long lease. But faint is the hope and 
scanty is the produce of those harvests which are raised by the 
reluctant toil of peasants and slaves condemned to a bare 
subsistance and careless of the interests of a rapacious master. 
If his granaries are full, his purse is empty, and the want of 
cities or commerce, the difficulty of finding or reaching a market, 
obliges him to consume on the spot a part of his useless stock, 
which cannot be exchanged for merchandise or money. . . . The 
entertainment of his vassals and soldiers, their pay and rewards, 
their arms and horses, surpassed the measure of the most op- 
pressive tribute, and the destruction which he inflicted on his 
neighbours was often retaliated on his own lands. The costly 
elegance of palaces and gardens was superseded by the laborious 
and expensive construction of strong castles on the summits of 
the most inaccessible rocks, and some of these, like the fortress 
of Canossa in the Apennine, were built and provided to sustain 
a three years' siege against a royal army. But his defence in 
this world was less burdensome to a wealthy lord than his sal- 
vation in the next j the demands of his chapel, his priests, his 



178 GIBBON. [chap. 

alms, his offerings, his pilgrimages -were incessantly renewed ; 
the monastery" chosen for his sepulchre was endowed with his 
fairest possessions, and the naked heir might often complain 
that his father's sins had been redeemed at too high a price. 
The Marquis Azo was not exempt from the contagion of the 
times ; his devotion was animated and inflamed by the 
frequent miracles that were performed in his presence ; and the 
monks of Vangadizza, who yielded to his request the arm of a 
dead saint, were not ignorant of the value of that inestimable 
jewel. After satisfying the demands of war and superstition he 
might appropriate the rest of his revenue to use and pleasure. 
But the Italians of the eleventh century were imperfectly skilled 
in the liberal and mechanical arts ; the objects of foreign luxury 
were furnished at an exorbitant price by the merchants of Pisa 
and Venice ; and the superfluous wealth which could not 
purchase the real comforts of life, were idly wasted on some 
rare occasions of vanity and pomp. Such were the nuptials of 
Boniface, Duke or Marquis of Tuscany, whose family was long 
' after united with that of Azo by the marriage of their children. 
These nuptials were celebrated on the banks of the Mincius, 
which the fancy of Virgil has decorated with a more beautiful 
picture. The princes and people of Italy were invited to the 
feasts, which continued three months ; the fertile meadows, 
which are intersected by the slow and winding course of the 
river, were covered with innumerable tents, and the bridegroom 
displayed and diversified the scenes of his proud and tasteless 
magnificence. All the utensils of the service were of silver, 
and his horses were shod with plates of the same metal, loosely 
nailed and carelessly dropped, to indicate his contempt of riches. 
An image of plenty and profusion was expressed in the banquet ; 
the most delicious wines were drawn in buckets from the well ; 
and the spices of the East were ground in water-mills like 
common flour. The dramatic and musical arts were in the 
rudest state ; but the Marquis had summoned the most popular 
singers, harpers, and buffoons to exercise their talents in this 
splendid theatre. After this festival I might remark a singular 
gift of this same Boniface to the Emperor Henry III., a chariot 
and oxen of solid silver, which were designed only as a vehicle 
for a hogshead of vinegar. If such an example should seem 



•x.] MISCELLANEOUS WOKKS. 179 

above the imitation of Azo himself, the Marquis of Este was 
at least superior in wealth and dignity to the vassals of his 
compeer. One of these vassals, the Viscount of Mantua, pre- 
sented the German monarch with one hundred falcons and one 
hundred bay horses, a grateful contribution to the pleasures of a 
royal sportsman. In that age the proud distinction between the 
nobles and princes of Italy was guarded with jealous ceremony. 
The Viscount of Mantua had never been seated at the table of 
his immediate lord ; he yielded to the invitation of the Emperor ; 
and a stag's skin filled with pieces of gold was graciously accepted 
by the Marquis of Tuscany as the fine of his presumption. 

" The temporal felicity of Azo was crowned by the long 
possession of honour and riches ; he died in the year 1097, aged 
upwards of an hundred years ; and the term of his mortal 
existence was almost commensurate with the lapse of the 
eleventh century. The character as well as the situation of the 
Marquis of Este rendered him. an actor in the revolutions of 
that memorable period ; but time has cast a veil over the virtues 
and vices of the man, and I must be content to mark some of 
the eras, the milestones of his which measure the extent and 
intervals of the vacant way. Albert Azo the Second was no 
more than seventeen when he first drew the sword of rebellion 
and patriotism, when he was involved with his grandfather, his 
father, and his three uncles in a common proscription. In the 
vigour of his manhood, about his fiftieth year, the Ligurian 
Marquis governed the cities of Milan and Genoa as the minister 
of Imperial authority. He was upwards of seventy when he 
passed the Alps to vindicate the inheritance of Maine for tjie 
children of his second marriage. He became the friend and 
servant of Gregory VII., and in one of his epistles that ambi- 
tious pontiff recommends the Marquis Azo, as the most faithful 
and best beloved of the Italian princes, as the proper channel 
through which a king of Hungary might convey his petitions to 
the apostolic throne. In the mighty contest between the crown 
and the mitre, the Marquis Azo and the Countess Matilda led 
the powers of Italy. And when the standard of St, Peter was 
displayed, neither the age of the one nor the sex of the other could 
detain them from the field. With these two affectionate clients 
the Pope maintained his station in the fortress of Canossa, while 



180 GIBBON. [chap. 

the Emperor, barefoot on the frozen ground, fasted and prayed 
three days at the foot of the rock ; they were witnesses to the 
abject ceremony of the penance and pardon of Henry IV. ; and 
in the triumph of the Church a patriot might foresee the de- 
liverance of Italy from the German yoke. At the time of this 
event the Marquis of Este was above fourscore ; but in the 
twenty following years he was still alive and active amidst the 
revolutions of peace and war. The last act which he sub- 
scribed is dated above a century after his birth ; and in that 
the venerable chief possesses the command of his faculties, his 
family, and his fortune. In this rare prerogative the longevity 
of Albert Azo the Second stands alone. Not can I remember 
in the authentic annals of mortality a single example of a king 
or prince, of a statesman or general, of a philosopher or poet, 
whose life has been extended beyond the period of a hundred 
years. . . . Three approximations which will not hastily be 
matched have distinguished the present century, Aurungzebe, 
Cardinal Fleury, and Fontenelle. Had a fortnight more been 
given to the philosopher, he might have celebrated his secular 
festival ; but the lives and labours of the Mogul king and the 
French minister were terminated before they had accomplished 
their ninetieth year." 

Then follow several striking and graceful pages on 
Lucrezia Borgia and Henee of France, Duchess of 
Ferrara. The following description of the University 
of Padua and the literary tastes of the house of Este 
is all that we can give here : — 

" An university had been founded at Padua by the house of 
Este, and the scholastic rust was polished away by the revival 
of the literature of Greece and Rome. The studies of Ferrara 
were directed by skilful and eloquent professors, either natives 
or foreigners. The ducal library was filled with a valuable 
collection of manuscripts and printed books, and as soon as 
twelve new plays of Plautus had been found in Germany, the 
Marquis Lionel of Este was impatient to obtain a fair and 
faithful copy of that ancient poet. Nor were these elegant 
pleasures confined to the learned world. Under the reign of 



x.] MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. 181 

Hercules I. a wooden theatre at a moderate cost of a thousand 
crowns was constructed in the largest court of the palace, the 
scenery represented some houses, a seaport and a ship, and 
the Menechmi of Plautus, which had been translated into 
Italian by the Duke himself, wa3 acted before a numerous and 
polite audience. In the same language and with the same suc- 
cess the Amphytrion of Plautus and the Eunuchus of Terence 
were successively exhibited. And these classic models, which 
formed the taste of the spectators, excited the emulation of the 
poets of the age. For the use of the court and theatre of 
Ferrara, Ariosto composed his comedies, which were often played 
with applause, which are still read with pleasure. And such 
was the enthusiasm of the new arts that one of the sons of 
Alphonso the First did not disdain to speak a prologue on the 
stage. In the legitimate forms of dramatic composition the 
Italians have not excelled ; but it was in the court of Ferrara 
that they invented and refined the pastoral cornedy, a romantic 
Arcadia which violates the truth of manners and the simplicity 
of nature, but which commands our indulgence by the elaborate 
luxury of eloquence and wit. The Aminta of Tasso was written 
for the amusement and acted in the presence of Alphonso the 
Second, and his sister Leonora might apply to herself the lan- 
guage of a passion which disordered the reason without clouding 
the genius of her poetical lover. Of the numerous imitations, the 
Pastor Fido of Gruarini, which alone can vie with the fame and 
merit of the original, is the work of the Duke's secretary 
of state. It was exhibited in a private house in Ferrara. 
.... The father of the Tuscan muses, the sublime but un- 
equal Dante, had pronounced that Ferrara was never honoured 
with the name of a poet ; he would have been astonished to 
behold the chorus of bards, of melodious swans (their own 
allusion), which now peopled the banks of the Po. In the 
court of Duke Borso and his successor, Boyardo Count 
Scandiano, was respected as a noble, a soldier, and a scholar : 
his vigorous fancy first celebrated the loves and exploits of 
the paladin Orlando ; and his fame has been preserved and 
eclipsed by the brighter glories and continuation of his work. 
Ferrara may boast that on classic ground Ariosto and Tasso 
lived and sung ; that the lines of the Orlando Furioso, the 



182 GIBBON. [chap. 

Gierusalemme Liberata were inscribed in everlasting characters 
under the eye of the First and Second Alphonso. In a period 
of near three thousand years, five great epic poets have arisen 
in the world, and it is a singular prerogative that two of the 
five should be claimed as their own by a short age and a petty 
state." 

It perhaps will be admitted that if the style of these 
passages is less elaborate than that of the Decline and 
Fall, the deficiency, if it is one, is compensated by 
greater ease and lightness of touch. 

It may be interesting to give a specimen of Gibbon's 
French style. His command of that language was not 
inferior to his command of his native idiom. One might 
even be inclined to say that his French prose is con- 
trolled by a purer taste than his English prose. The 
following excerpt, describing the Battle of Morgarten, 
will enable the reader to judge. It is taken from his 
early unfinished work on the History of the Swiss 
Republic, to which reference has already been made 
(p. 59) :- 

" Leopold e"tait parti de Zug vers le milieu de la.nuit. H se 
flattait d'occuper sans resistance le defile de Morgarten qui ne 
percait qu'avec difficulte entre le lac Aegre et le pied d'une 
montagne escarpee. II marchait a la tete de sa gendarmerie. 
Une colonne profond d'infanterie le suivait de pres, et les uns 
et les autres se promettaient une victoire facile si les paysans 
osaient se presenter a leur rencontre, lis etaient a peine entres 
dans un cheruin rude et 6troit, et qui ne permettait qu'a trois 
ou quatre de marcher de front, qu'ils se sentirent accables d'une 
grele de pierres et de traits. Eodolphe de Eeding, landamman 
de Schwitz et general des Confederes, n'avait oublie aucun des 
avantages que lui offrit la situation des lieux. II avait fait 
couper des rochers enorrnes, qui en s'ebranlant des qu'on reti- 
rait les faibles appuis qui les retenaient encore, se detachaient 
du sommet de la montaigne et se precipitaient avec un bruit 



x.] GIBBON'S FRENCH STYLE. 138 

affreux sur les bataillons serres des Autrichiens. Deja les 
chevaux s'effrayaient, les rangs se confondaient, et le desordre 
^garait le courage et le rendait inutile, lorsque les Suisses de- 
scendirent de la montagne en poussant de grands cris. Ac- 
coutumes a poursuivre le chamois sur les bords glissants des 
precipices, ils couraient d'un pas assure au milieu des neiges. 
lis Etaient armes de grosses et pesantes hallebardes, auxquelles 
le fer le mieux trempe ne resistait point. Les soldats de Leopold 
chancelants et decourages cederent bientot aux efforts desesper^s 
d'une troupe qui combattait pour tout ce qu'il y a de plus cher 
aux hommes. L'Abbe d'Einsidlen, premier auteur de cette 
guerre malheureuse, et le comte Henri de Montfort, donnerent 
les premiers 1' example de la fuite. Le desordre devint general, 
le carnage fut affreux, et les Suisses se livraient au plaisir de 
la vengeance. A neuf heures du matin la bataille etait gagnee. 
.... Un grand uombre d' Autrichiens se precipitant les uns 
sur les autres, chercherent vainement dans le lac un asyle contre 
la fureur de leurs ennemis. Ils y perirent presque tous. 
Quinze cents hommes resterent sur le champ de bataille. Ils 
6taient pour la plupart de la gendarmerie, qu'une valeur mal- 
heureuse et une armure pesante arretaient dans un lieu oil 
l'un et l'autre leur etaient inutiles. Longtemps apres Ton 
s'apercevait dans toutes les provinces voisines que Mite de 
la noblesse avait peri dans cette fatale journee. L'infanterie 
beaucoup moins engaged dans le defile, vit en tremblant la 
defaite des chevaliers qui passaient pour invincibles, et dont les 
escadrons effray^s se renversaient sur elle. Elle s'arreta, voulut 
se retirer, et dans rinstant cette retraite devint une fuite hon- 
teuse. Sa perte fut assez peu considerable, mais les historiens 
de la nation ont conserve la memoire de cinquante braves 
Zuriquois dont. on trouva les rangs couches morts sur la place. 
Leopold lui-meme fut entraine par la foule qui le portait du 
cote de Zug. On le vit entrer dans sa ville de Winterthur. La 
frayeur, la honte et l'indignation etaient encore peintes sur son 
front. Des que la victoire se fut declared en faveur des Suisses, 
ils s'assemblerent sur le champ de bataille, s'embrasserent en 
versant des larmes d'all^gresse, et remercierent Dieu de la grace 
qu'il venait de leur faire, et qui ne leur avait coute que quatorze 
de leurs compagnons." 



184 GIBBON. [chap. x. 

His familiar letters and a number of essays, chiefly 
written in youth, form the remainder of the miscella- 
neous works. Of the letters, some have been quoted 
in this volume, and the reader can form his own judg- 
ment of them. Of the small essays we may say that 
they augment, if it is possible, one's notion of Gibbon's 
laborious diligence and thoroughness in the field of 
historic research, and confirm his title to the character 
of an intrepid student. 

The lives of scholars are proverbially dull, and that of 
Gibbon is hardly an exception to the rule. In the case 
of historians, the protracted silent labour of preparation, 
followed by the conscientious exposition of knowledge 
acquired, into which the intrusion of the writer's per. 
sonality rarely appears to advantage, combine to give 
prominence to the work achieved, and to throw into 
the background the author who achieves it. If indeed 
the historian, forsaking his high function and austere 
reserve, succumbs to the temptations that beset his 
path, and turns history into political pamphlet, poetic 
rhapsody, moral epigram, or garish melodrama, he may 
become conspicuous to a fault at the expense of his 
work. Gibbon avoided these seductions. If the Decline 
and Fall has no superior in historical literature, it is 
not solely in consequence of Gibbon's profound learning, 
wide survey, and masterly grasp of his subject. With 
wise discretion, he subordinated himself to his task. The 
life of Gibbon is the less interesting, but his work 
remains monumental and supreme. 



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